dinner-party last night was bad enough, but to-day's been worse.
I didn't sleep until long after daylight and then Judy came in before
eight o'clock with a letter for me that looked like a state document.
I felt in my trembly bones that it was some sort of summons affair from
Judge Wade; and it was. I looked into the first paragraph and then
decided that I had better get up and dress and have a cup of coffee and
a single egg before I tried to read it.

Incidental to my bath and dressing, I weighed and found that I had lost
all four of those last surplus pounds and two more in three days. Those
two extra pounds might be construed to prove love, but exactly on whom
I was utterly unprepared to say. I didn't even enjoy the thinness, but
took a kind of already-married look in my glass and tried to slip the
egg past my bored lips and get myself to chew it down. It was work; and
then I took up the judge's letter, which also was work and more of it.

He started in at the beginning of everything, that is at the beginning
of the tuberculosis girl and I cried over the pages of her as if she had
been my own sister. At the tenth page we buried her and took up Alfred
and I must say I saw a new Alfred in the judge's bouquet-strewn
appreciation of him, but I didn't want him as bad as I had the day
before when I read his own new and old letters, and cried over his old
photographs. I suppose that was the result of some of what the judge
manages the juries with. He'd be apt to use it on a woman and she
wouldn't find out about it until it was too late to be anything but mad.
Still when he began on me at page sixteen I felt a little better, though
I didn't know myself any better than I did Alfred when I got to page
twenty.

What I am, is just a poor foolish woman, who has a lot more heart than
she can manage with the amount of brains she got with it at birth. I'm
not any star in a rose-colored sky, and I don't want to inspire anybody;
it's too much of a job. I want to be a healthy happy woman and a wife to
a man who can inspire himself and manage me. I want to marry a thin man
and have from five to ten thin children, and when I get to be thirty I
want my husband to want me to be as fat as Aunt Bettie, but not let me.
An inspiration couldn't be fat and I'm always in danger from hot muffins
and chicken gravy. However, if I should undertake to be all the things
Judge Wade said in that letter he wanted me to be to him, I should soon
be skin a