ar wheels breaks down and needs to be
sent away for repairs. These are the middle-aged, unmarried aunts and
cousins--staunch, reliable--who are sent for to take care of the
children while mother runs over to Europe for a holiday. And some are
fifth wheels like myself--neither old nor self-effacing, neither
middle-aged nor useful, but simply expensive to keep painted, and very
hungry for the road. It may be only a matter of time, however, when I
shall be middle-aged and useful, and later old and self-effacing; when
I shall stay and take care of the children, and go upstairs early when
the young people are having a party.

A young technical college graduate told me once, to comfort me, I
suppose, that a fifth wheel is considered by a carriage-maker a very
important part of a wagon. He tried to explain to me just what part of a
wagon it was. You can't see it. It's underneath somewhere, and has to be
kept well oiled. I am not very mechanical, but it sounded ignominious to
me. I told that young man that I wanted to be one of the four wheels
that held the coach up and made it speed, not tucked out of sight,
smothered in carriage-grease.

It came as a shock to me when I first realized my superfluous position
in this world. The result of that shock was what led me to abandon my
ideals on love in an attempt to avoid the possibility of going upstairs
early and having dinners off a tray.

When my brother Alec married Edith Campbell, and Edith came over to our
house and remodeled it, I didn't feel supplanted. There was a room built
especially for me with a little bath-room of its own, a big closet, a
window-box filled with flowers in the summer, and cretonne hangings that
I picked out myself. My sister Lucy had a room too--for she wasn't
married then--and the entire attic was finished up as barracks for my
brothers, the twins, who were in college at the time. They were invited
to bring home all the friends they wanted to. Edith was a big-hearted
sister-in-law. To me her coming was like the advent of a fairy
godmother. I had chafed terribly under the economies of my earlier
years. It wasn't until Alec married Edith that fortune began to smile.

One by one the family left the Homestead--Lucy, when she married Dr.
William Maynard and went away to live near the university with which
Will was connected, and Oliver and Malcolm when they graduated from
college and went into business. I alone was left living with Alec and
Edith. I was