A lovely letter from his mother saying they were "very pleased when [he] wrote home and told us you were the one and only." I could go into a little guilt trip here, but I'm certain you're all sick of that and we all know by now that I was never anyone's "one and only." I'll concentrate on the rest of the letter.

She talks about their store. They owned a hardware store. My fiancee' was going to go into business with his father, upon his release from the army, and we would get married and live happily ever after running a hardware store in this lovely little town within spitting distance - well, a little further than that, but hardly worth mentioning - from Chicago.

I wasn't interested in this store. I liked jazz (to which he had introduced me) and the big city and sophistication (of which I had none) and days of wine and roses (without rehab). When she talked of him taking over the toy department when he returned home, and of an old buddy of his who recently came to work for them, and of getting ready for Santa to visit the store by Thanksgiving, I'm afraid I found it somewhat embarrassing. Business was beneath me. If I had been born British, I would have shunned the merchant class. My father was a merchant - no, worse. He was a manufacturer. I was trying to shun my family, and probably his. Although I liked his better. Probably because they weren't mine.

I wasn't a money snob, however. It was not as if I pretended to landed or moneyed aristocracy. No, not at all. It was iintellectual snobbery at its worst, with not much more intellectual property than land or money. I probably held it against them that they hadn't read Toynbee. Neither had I, but at least I was planning to.