. I don't intend to be
held down. I _can't_ be held down. I haven't the remotest idea of how
it's going to happen, but I'm going to love life again, and be happy,
and carol out like a meadow-lark on a blue and breezy April morning.
It may not come to-morrow, and it may not come the next day. But it's
going to come. And knowing it's going to come, I can afford to sit
tight, and abide my time....

I've just had a letter from Uncle Chandler, enclosing snap-shots of
the place he's bought in New Jersey. It looks very palatial and
settled and Old-Worldish, shaded and shadowed with trees and softened
with herbage, dignified by the hand of time. It reminds me how many
and many a long year will have to go by before our bald young prairie
can be tamed and petted into a homeyness like that. Uncle Chandler has
rather startled me by suggesting that we send Elmer through to him, to
go to school in the East. He says the boy can attend Montclair
Academy, that he can be taken there and called for every day by
faithful old Fisher, in the cabriolet, and that on Sunday he can be
toted regularly to St. Luke's Episcopal Church, and occasionally go
into New York for some of the better concerts, and even have a
governess of his own, if he'd care for it. And in case I should be
worrying about his welfare Uncle Chandler would send me a weekly
night-letter "describing the condition and the activities of the
child," as the letter expresses it. It sounds very appealing, but
every time I try to think it over my heart goes down like a dab-chick.
My Dinkie is such a little fellow. And he's my first-born, my
man-child, and he means so much in my life. Yet he and his father are
not getting along very well together. It would be better, in many
respects, if the boy could get away for a while, until the raw edges
healed over again. It would be better for both of them. But there's
one thing that would happen: he would grow away from his mother. He'd
come back to me a stranger. He'd come back a little ashamed of his
shabby prairie mater, with her ten-years-old style of hair-dressing
and her moss-grown ideas of things and her bald-looking prairie home
with no repose and no dignifying background and neither a private gym
nor a butler to wheel in the cinnamon-toast. He'd be having all those
things, under Uncle Chandler's roof: he'd get used to them and he'd
expect them.

But there's one thing he wouldn't and couldn't have. He wouldn't have
his mother. And no