So I sent it off.

* * * * *

March.

Yes, I know it’s been quite a while, but there hasn’t been a thing to say—­nothing new or exciting, I mean.  There’s just school, and the usual things; only Mr. Easterbrook doesn’t come any more. (Of course, the violinist hasn’t come since that day he proposed.) I don’t know whether Mr. Easterbrook proposed or not.  I only know that all of a sudden he stopped coming.  I don’t know the reason.

I don’t overhear so much as I used to, anyway.  Not but that I’m in the library window-seat just the same; but ’most everybody that comes in looks there right off, now; and, of course, when they see me they don’t hardly ever go on with what they are saying.  So it just naturally follows that I don’t overhear things as I used to.

Not that there’s much to hear, though.  Really, there just isn’t anything going on, and things aren’t half so lively as they used to be when Mr. Easterbrook was here, and all the rest.  They’ve all stopped coming, now, ’most.  I’ve about given up ever having a love story of Mother’s to put in.

And mine, too.  Here I am fifteen next month, going on sixteen. (Why, that brook and river met long ago!) But Mother is getting to be almost as bad as Aunt Jane was about my receiving proper attentions from young men.  Oh, she lets me go to places, a little, with the boys at school; but I always have to be chaperoned.  And whenever are they going to have a chance to say anything really thrilling with Mother or Aunt Hattie right at my elbow?  Echo answers never!  So I’ve about given up that’s amounting to anything, either.

Of course, there’s Father left, and of course, when I go back to Andersonville this summer, there may be something doing there.  But I doubt it.

I forgot to say I haven’t heard from Father again.  I answered his Christmas letter, as I said, and wrote just as nice as I knew how, and told him all he asked me to.  But he never answered, nor wrote again.  I am disappointed, I’ll own up.  I thought he would write.  I think Mother did, too.  She’s asked me ever so many times if I hadn’t heard from him again.  And she always looks so sort of funny when I say no—­sort of glad and sorry together, all in one.

But, then, Mother’s queer in lots of ways now.  For instance:  One week ago she gave me a perfectly lovely box of chocolates—­a whole two-pound box all at once; and I’ve never had more than a half-pound at once before.  But just as I was thinking how for once I was going to have a real feast, and all I wanted to eat—­what do you think she told me?  She said I could have three pieces, and only three pieces a day; and not one little tiny one more.  And when I asked her why she gave me such a big box for, then, if that was all I could have, she said it was to teach me self-discipline.  That self-discipline was one of the most wonderful things in the world.  That if she’d only been taught it when she was a girl, her life would have been very, very different.  And so she was giving me a great big box of chocolates for my very own, just so as to teach me to deny myself and take only three pieces every day.