The merits of the different PENSIONS also formed a subject of vital interest.The advantages and disadvantages of these rival establishments were, as a topic, never exhausted.MADAME UNE TELLEgave five o'clock tea, included in the seven francs a day, but her rival gave one more meat course at dinner and her coffee was certainly better, while a third undoubtedly had a nicer set of people.No one here at home can realize the importance these matters gradually assume in the eyes of the exiles.Their slender incomes have to be so carefully handled to meet the strain of even this simple way of living, if they are to show a surplus for a little trip to the seashore in the summer months, that an extra franc a day becomes a serious consideration.
Every now and then a family stronger-minded than the others, or with serious reasons for returning home (a daughter to bring out or a son to put into business), would break away from its somnolent surroundings and re-cross the Atlantic, alternating between hope and fear.It is here that a sad fate awaits these modern Rip Van Winkles.They find their native cities changed beyond recognition.
(For we move fast in these days.) The mother gets out her visiting list of ten years before and is thunderstruck to find that it contains chiefly names of the "dead, the divorced, and defaulted."The waves of a decade have washed over her place and the world she once belonged to knows her no more.The leaders of her day on whose aid she counted have retired from the fray.Younger, and alas! unknown faces sit in the opera boxes and around the dinner tables where before she had found only friends.After a feeble little struggle to get again into the "swim," the family drifts back across the ocean into the quiet back water of a continental town, and goes circling around with the other twigs and dry leaves, moral flotsam and jetsam, thrown aside by the great rush of the outside world.