for regret. And there is always the future, the
happier to-morrow to which our thoughts go out. I get to thinking of the
city again, of the hundreds of women I know going like hundreds of crazy
squirrels on their crazy treadmill of amusements, and of the thousands
and thousands of women who are toiling without hope, going on in the
same old rut from day to day, cooped up in little flats and back rooms,
with bad air and bad food and bad circulation, while I have all God's
outdoors to wander about in, and can feel the singing rivers of health
in my veins. And here I side-step my Song-of-Solomon voluntary, for they
have one thing I _do_ miss, and that is music. I wish I had a
cottage-piano or a Baby Grand or a _Welte Mignon_! I wish I had any
kind of an old piano! I wish I had an accordion, or a German
Sweet-Potato, or even a Jew's-Harp!

But what's the use of wishing for luxuries, when we haven't even a
can-opener--Dinky-Dunk says he's used a hatchet for over a year! And our
only toaster is a kitchen-fork wired to the end of a lath. I even saw
Dinky-Dunk spend half an hour straightening out old nails taken from one
of our shipping-boxes. And the only colander we have was made out of a
leaky milk-pan with holes punched in its bottom. And we haven't a
double-boiler or a mixing-bowl or a doughnut-cutter. When I told
Dinky-Dunk yesterday that we were running out of soap, he said he'd
build a leach of wood-ashes and get beef-tallow and make soft soap. I
asked him how long he'd want to kiss a downy cheek that had been washed
in soft soap. He said he'd keep on kissing me if I was a mummy pickled
in bitumen. But I prefer not risking too much of the pickling process.

Which reminds me of the fact that I find my hair a terrible nuisance,
with no Hortense to struggle with it every morning. As you know, it's as
thick as a rope and as long as my arm. I begrudge the time it takes to
look after it, and such a thing as a good shampoo is an event to be
approached with trepidation and prepared for with zeal. "Coises on me
beauty!" I think I'll cut that wool off. But on each occasion when I
have my mind about made up I experience one of "Mr. Polly's" l'il dog
moments. The thing that makes me hesitate is the thought that Dinky-Dunk
might hate me for the rest of his days. And now that our
department-store aristocracy seems to have a corner in Counts and I seem
destined to worry along with merely an American husband, I don't intend
to throw a