to
bring up a second crop of children, I want to play. It's terrible to
realize that you don't learn how to live until you're ready to die; and,
then it's too late. I know I sound like a selfish old woman, and I am,
and I don't care. I don't care. I want to be selfish. So will you, too,
when you're sixty, Martha Slocum. You think you're young. But all of a
sudden you'll be sixty, like me. All of a sudden you'll realize----"

"Mother, you're not eating a thing." Ed's kindly voice.

Marcia, flushed of face, pushed her hair back from her forehead with a
little frenzied familiar gesture. "Eat! Who could eat with Joan making
that insane racket in there! Ed, will you tell her to stop! Can't you
speak to her just once! After all, she is your child, too, you know....
Peter, eat your lettuce or you can't have any dessert."

How tired she looked, Hannah Winter thought. Little Martha. Two babies,
and she only a baby herself yesterday. How tired she looked.

"I wanna go!" wailed Joan, from her bedroom prison. "I wanna go
to-morrow. You promised me. You said I could. I wanna GO!"

"And I say you can't. Mother has to give up her holiday, too, because of
you. And yet you don't hear me----"

"You!" shouted the naughty Joan, great-granddaughter of her
great-grandmother, and granddaughter of her grandmamma. "_You_ don't
care. Giving up's easy for you. You're an old lady."

And then Hannah Winter spoke up. "I'll stay with her to-morrow, Marcia.
You and Ed go and have a good time."

IF I SHOULD EVER TRAVEL!

The fabric of my faithful love
No power shall dim or ravel
Whilst I stay here,--but oh, my dear,
If I should ever travel!
--Millay.

If you've spent more than one day in Okoochee, Oklahoma, you've had
dinner at Pardee's. Someone--a business acquaintance, a friend, a
townsman--has said, "Oh, you stopping at the Okmulgee Hotel?
WON--derful, isn't it? Nothing finer here to the Coast. I bet you
thought you were coming to the wilderness, didn't you? You Easterners!
Think we live in tents and eat jerked venison and maize, huh? Never
expected, I bet, to see a twelve-story hotel with separate ice-water
faucet in every bathroom and a bath to every room. What'd you think of
the Peacock grill, h'm?"

"Well--uh"--hesitatingly--"very nice, but why don't you have something
native ... Decorations and ... Peacock grill is New York, not Okla----"

"Z'that so! Well, let me tell you you won't find any