romance-fiddlers try to make it. Even Dinky-Dunk doesn't
approve of my mammalogical allusions. Yet milk, I find, is one of the
most important issues of motherhood--only it's impolite to mention the
fact. What makes me so impatient of life as I see it reflected in
fiction is its trick of overlooking the important things and
over-accentuating the trifles. It primps and tries to be genteel--for
Biology doth make cowards of us all.

I was going to say, very sagely, that life isn't so mysterious after
you've been the mother of three children. But that wouldn't be quite
right. It's mysterious in an entirely different way. Even love itself
is different, I concluded, after lying there in bed day after day and
thinking the thing over. For there are so many different ways, I find,
of loving a man. You are fond of him, at first, for what you consider
his perfections, the same as you are fond of a brand-new traveling
bag. There isn't a scratch on his polish or a flaw in his make-up.
Then you live with him for a few years. You live with him and find
that life is making a few dents in his loveliness of character, that
the edges are worn away, that there's a weakness or two where you
imagined only strength to be, and that instead of standing a saint and
hero all in one, he's merely an unruly and unreliable human being with
his ups and downs of patience and temper and passion. But, bless his
battered old soul, you love him none the less for all that. You no
longer fret about him being unco guid, and you comfortably give up
trying to match his imaginary virtues with your own. You still love
him, but you love him differently. There's a touch of pity in your
respect for him, a mellowing compassion, a little of the eternal
mother mixed up with the eternal sweetheart. And if you are wise you
will no longer demand the impossible of him. Being a woman, you will
still want to be loved. But being a woman of discernment, you will
remember that in some way and by some means, if you want to be loved,
you must remain lovable.

_Thursday the Nineteenth_

I had to stay in that smelly old hole of a hospital and in that bald
little prairie city fully a week longer than I wanted to. I tried to
rebel against being bullied, even though the hand of iron was padded
with velvet. But the powers that be were too used to handling perverse
and fretful women. They thwarted my purpose and broke my will and kept
me in bed until I be