ep the home fires burning is right, we done it,
especially the White Kittens Belgian Relief, which it's a fact we nearly
split over whether we'd print our postcard appeals on pink or yellow
cards!

Well, anyways, I suppose these relief committees was a big help to them
that was on them if not to any one else, and after all a lot of money
somehow got left to do good with after expenses was paid. But the
biggest relief I know of come from relieving ourselfs of them relief
committees, and the last of all was the Welcome Home one.

I wouldn't of gone on it in the first place only I was so low in my
mind. And who wouldn't be a little low even with my cheery disposition
after such a morning as I went through, first commencing with the loss
of Maude.

Not that I had ever liked her nor 'Frisco, her husband, either, but
losing her was worse than living with her any day, and when Ma come in
and broke the news I wasn't in any mood for it, struggling as I was over
the joint contract which Goldringer had just sent on from Los Angeles as
a nice surprise and welcome for Jim which we were expecting to hear he
would be leaving France any day now. It called for seventy-five thousand
per each of us for six joint pictures, our expenses to the coast, and I
was holding out for a car while there and a special publicity man of our
own to be paid by them, but chosen by us, meaning Rosco, which has so
faithfully let the public know every time I sneezed these last five
years and has a way of disguising a two column ad so's the editor thinks
it's a news item.

Well, anyways, I was reading through all that foreign language portion
of this contract and had waded past about a page of "to wit, viz.: party
of the first part" stuff, which sounds like it didn't mean anything,
but is where they sometimes slip one over on you, when in come Ma with a
big home-made cruller partly in her hand and partly in her face. She was
dreadfull agitated but had to get rid of the first part of the second
party before she could speak, and I put in a few seconds of watchful
waiting, wondering how could she do it, for Ma had put on at least
thirty lbs. the last few months and believe you me, she was no slif
before then, weighing some amount she would never tell just what and
anybody knows what that means with a woman. But up to just recent she
had gone through spells where she was making at least the faint motions
of dieting, or when not that, sighing and saying she h