To hot young hearts beating passionately in strong breasts, the sweetest thing is motion.

No, that part of me went beyond my mother’s understanding.  On the other hand, there was a part of my mother—­her brave cheerfulness, her trust in God, her heroic struggle to keep the home together—­which went soaring on beyond my understanding, leaving me a coward weakling, grovelling in the dust.

Would that hot dreary day never close?  What advantage when it did?  The next and the next and many weeks of others just the same were following hard after.

If the souls of lives were voiced in music, there are some that none but a great organ could express, others the clash of a full orchestra, a few to which nought but the refined and exquisite sadness of a violin could do justice.  Many might be likened unto common pianos, jangling and out of tune, and some to the feeble piping of a penny whistle, and mine could be told with a couple of nails in a rusty tin-pot.

Why do I write?  For what does any one write?  Shall I get a hearing?  If so—­what then?

I have voiced the things around me, the small-minded thoughts, the sodden round of grinding tasks—­a monotonous, purposeless, needless existence.  But patience, O heart, surely I can make a purpose!  For the present, of my family I am the most suited to wait about common public-houses to look after my father when he is inebriated.  It breaks my mother’s heart to do it; it is dangerous for my brothers; imagine Gertie in such a position!  But me it does not injure, I have the faculty for doing that sort of thing without coming to harm, and if it makes me more bitter and godless, well, what matter?

II

The next letter I received from Gertie contained: 

suppose you were glad to see Harry.  He did not tell me he was going, or I would have sent some things by him.  I thought he would he able to tell me lots about you that I was dying to hear, but he never said a word, only that you were all well.  He went travelling some weeks ago.  I missed him at first because he used to be so kind to me; but now I don’t, because Mr Creyton, whom Harry left to manage Five-Bob, comes just as often as Harry used to, and is lots funnier.  He brings me something nice every time.  Uncle Jay-Jay teases me about him.

Happy butterfly-natured Gertie!  I envied her.  With Gertie’s letter came also one from grannie, with further mention of Harold Beecham.

We don’t know what to make of Harold Beecham.  He was always such a steady fellow, and hated to go away from home even for a short time, but now he has taken an idea to rush away to America, and is not coming home till he has gone over the world.  He is not going to see anything, because by cablegrams his aunts got he is one place today and hundreds of miles away tomorrow.  It is some craze he has suddenly taken.  I was asking Augusta if there was ever any lunacy