tall or short, whichever way one looks at
me. I thought I was taller, but I suppose I will have to believe my own
yardstick.

But as to my waist measure, I positively refuse to write that down, even
if I have promised Doctor John a dozen times over to do it, while I only
really left him to _suppose_ I would. It is bad enough to know that
your belt has to be reduced to twenty-three inches without putting down
how much it measures now in figures to insult yourself with. No, I
intend to have this for my happy spring.

Yes, I suppose it would have been lots better for my happiness if I had
kept quiet about it all, but at the time I thought I had to advise with
him over the matter. Now I'm sorry I did. That is one thing about being
a widow, you are accustomed to advising with a man, whether you want to
or not, and you can't get over the habit right away. Poor Mr. Carter
hasn't been dead much over a year and I must be missing him most
awfully, though just lately I can't remember not to forget about him a
great deal of the time. Now if he had been here--_horrors_!

Still, that letter was enough to upset anybody, and no wonder I ran
right across my garden, through Billy's hedge-hole and over into Doctor
John's office to tell him about it; but I ought not to have been
agitated enough to let him take the letter right out of my hand and read
it.

"So after ten years Al Bennett is coming back to pop his
bachelor's-buttons at you, Mrs. Molly?" he said in the deep drawling
voice he always uses when he makes fun of Billy and me and which never
fails to make us both mad. I didn't look at him directly, but I felt his
hand shake with the letter in it.

"Not ten, only _eight_! He went when I was seventeen," I answered
with dignity, wishing I dared be snappy at him; though I never am.

"And after eight years he wants to come back and find you squeezed into
a twenty-inch-waist, blue muslin rag you wore at parting? No wonder Al
didn't succeed at bank clerking, but had to make his hit at diplomacy
and the high arts. Some hit at that to be legationed at Saint James!
He's such a big gun that it is a pity he had to return to his native
heath and find even such a slight disappointment as a one-yard waist
measure around his--his--"

"Oh it's not, it's _not_ that much." I fairly gasped and I couldn't
help the tears coming into my eyes. I have never said much about it, but
nobody knows how it hurts me to be all this fat! Just writing it down