Billy has been pretty good about writing. Much better than I have
been. I told him I would tell him all about Twickenham and the people,
and what they did and how they did, and I intended to do it, but that
is my chief trouble. I'm a grand intender and a poor doer. Billy
never promises and always does. He sends cards from every place, he
goes to, and a good many from the same place so I can see what he is
seeing, which I couldn't do if he wrote a book of descriptions. He
doesn't tell much about the cities and towns, most of which I have been
in myself and am glad he leaves out, but he writes awfully interesting
things about the places he pokes into by himself and the people he
meets, and I almost die laughing over his accounts of his sister and a
beau his mother has caught for her. She is a dandy-looking girl, his
sister is, and wears the smartest clothes I ever saw except Florine's,
and if Patricia has really landed a duke or a count or a thing of that
sort, his mother will have a wedding that will fit the fellow all
right. He's apt to be landed.
I never have understood how Billy was born of his parents. He cares no
more for flum-foolishness than I do, which is why we have so much fun
over the efforts certain mothers we know make to help their daughters
get married, and we've decided to be failures as social successes and
enjoy ourselves. My mother isn't at all like his mother. She is a
precious mother, mine is, and adores Father and her children, but she
is in the parade and has to keep step, not having courage to get out,
and she thinks she must give her daughters every opportunity, and for
daughters in Mother's world opportunity means marriage. Until she gets
us settled she won't feel as if her duty had been done. That's why she
has gone with Florine and Jessica to the same place Florine went to
last summer with the Logans. Florine has had a good many beaux, but
none of them has been just what she had set her mind on, and last
summer she met a man I believe she fell in love with. Anyhow, she has
gone where it will be convenient for him to see her if he wants to, and
he must want, as Mother says in every one of her letters that Mr.
Jeffry has just come or just gone. He came to see Florine last winter,
and a blind person could tell he was worth having. I hope they will
take each other. Mother would be so pleased. Jessica and I are not
apt to do much for ourselves in the marrying line, so it is left to
Florine to make the catch.
She is very beautiful, Florine is. She knows it and she loves
beautiful things and wouldn't think of marrying any one who could not
give them to her. She wouldn't marry a man who isn't decent and
straight and all that, not being that kind, but neither is she
romantic, and nothing on earth could make her lose her head. She is
cool and deliberate and far-seeing, and not apt to ask herself too many
questions about love alone when thinking about marriage. She is a
dream to look at, which Jessica isn't, but I love Jessica best.
Last night in bed I got to thinking about old Jess, and wondering how
she was making out with that bunch up there, and I almost rolled out at
the way her nose must be turning up inside of her at some of the things
she was seeing and hearing and had to take part in; and I laughed so
loud that Miss Susanna came in my room to see if anything were the
matter. I told her no, and that I was just thinking of something, so
she pattered back, and I put my face in the pillow to keep her from
hearing me again. But it was hard not to let it come out. Mother's
daughters are a mixture all right, and no more alike than if they
weren't related to one another. Being a parent must be an anxious job.
I hope I will have a dozen children, but they'll probably be right much
to manage. If I turn out to be a childless old maid, I'll adopt a boy
and girl, anyhow. I can do that if I can't do anything else.
Jessica is the clever one of our family. Florine has the beauty and
Jessica the brains, and so far nothing has shown signs in me, but
something may turn up yet. Jessica is an A.M., and she has Ideas and
Views and Opinions which she isn't stingy with and lets anybody have
who is within hearing, and she wanted to be something, have a Career
and get an Identity, which she says a woman has no chance of doing as
long as she sinks herself in marriage; but Father said she couldn't go
to any more colleges until she had had a fling at fun, for it wasn't
fair to Mother. She came out last winter and had a fearful rush
because she was so different from the other girls.
I don't believe Jessica would ever have wasted a winter doing the
things she did last year if she hadn't wanted to see for herself what
was in it, anyhow, in society I mean, so she took a header and plunged
all right. She says she has a scientific and analytical mind and she
worked it all out--the number of hours and days and weeks and months
she had spent flopping around from one party to another, and doing the
things she was supposed to do, and saying the things she wasn't
supposed to say, and then she estimated the cost in time and strength
and money and wear and tear on her character, and announced that it
wasn't a paying business, and at the end of the year she was going to
get out. The year won't be up until October and that is why she is
with Mother and Florine this summer.
What she is going in for when it is up I don't believe she knows
herself, yet. She says woman to-day is in the most unsettled and
uncertain state that any animal has ever been in since the first one, a
mollusk, or something without a backbone started to get one. And that
it will take time for woman to evolute into being the best kind of a
human being she is capable of becoming, and that the next step in the
evoluting is to get out of her head some of the foolishness put in it
by men people who didn't know what they were talking about. Mother
thinks it fearful in her to talk as she does, and can't understand how
she can be so daring and so indelicate as to speak about coming from
mollusks and things which don't have spinal columns and nervous
systems, but Jessica says that is because Mother belongs to a day that
didn't know about such things, and that the modern woman is shedding
the shucks which have kept her a caterpillar much longer than was
necessary. A good many old ideas she thinks are shucks--that is, she
pretends to; but she is an old dear just the same, if she does say
things about people which it isn't polite to say.
I love old Jess. She isn't but twenty-two, and she will be less sniffy
some of these days and not so scornful and impatient with repeaters and
parasiters and people like that, but just now she says they aren't
worth wasting time on. She can talk you right into seeing her way, and
the first thing you know you are agreeing with her, and she has landed
you before you realized the net was out. Landed outsiders, I mean.
She will never land Mother and Florine. I love to hear her talk,
though I don't think I am going to be a Careering person. I'd like to
be one, but with a dozen children I am afraid there won't be time. I
wouldn't tell old Jess, but I don't think she is going to Career very
long, either. I believe she is in love with the man who taught her
some of the ologies she is so interested in. He is awfully nice, but
not very practical. He is a psychological sociologist or a
sociological psychologist, I don't know which, but it doesn't matter.
If Jess marries him she will run him and the house.