Uncle Parke and Aunt Katherine have been on the ocean three days.  I wonder if they are sick.  I don’t think I will go to Europe with my children’s father.  I was seasick once on land, and there wasn’t a human being I even liked that day.  It would be bad to find out so soon that the very sight of your husband makes you ill.  After you know him better, you could tell him to go off somewhere; but at first I suppose you have to be polite.

They were awful nice about wanting me to go with them.  The bride and groom were.  They said I had to, and they were so surprised when I said I couldn’t that they didn’t think I meant it.  When they found out I did, they were dreadfully worried, and didn’t know what to do next.  There wasn’t anything to do, and here I am.  Here I’m going to be, too, until the first day of October, when they will be back, and we will start for the West, for Michigan.

I’m going to like Michigan.  I’ve decided before I get there.  I know there will be something to like, there always is in every place and every person, Miss Katherine says, if you just will see it instead of the all wrong.  I was by nature born critical.  There are a lot of things I don’t like in this world, but there’s no use in mentioning them.  As for opinions, if they’re not pleasant they’d better be kept to yourself.  I learned that early in life and forget it every day.

I’m going to try and think Michigan is a grand place, and next to Virginia the best to live in.  They couldn’t, couldn’t expect me to think it was like Virginia!

Perhaps, after a while, Uncle Parke may come back.  For over two hundred years his people have lived here, and sometimes I believe he feels just like that dog did who had his call in him.  The call of the place that the first dogs came from, that wild, free place, and I think Uncle Parke wants to come back, wants to be with his own people.

Out West is very convenient, though, Peggy Green says.  She has an aunt who used to live out there, and she told her you could do as you choose in almost everything.  If husbands and wives didn’t like each other, there was no trouble in getting new ones.  They could get a divorce and marry somebody else.

I wonder what a divorce is.  We’ve never had one in Yorkburg, and I never knew until the other day that when you got married it wasn’t really truly permanent.  I thought it was for ever and ever and until death parted.  The prayer-book says so, and I thought it meant it.

By the time I’m grown I guess I’ll find a lot of things are said and not meant.  Maybe when I find out I will be all the gladder to come back to Yorkburg, where people don’t seem to know much about these new-fashioned things.  Where they still believe in the old ones, and just live on and don’t hurry, and are kind and polite and dear, if they are slow and queer and proud a little bit.

It makes me have such a funny feeling in my throat when I think about going away.  I’m trying not to think.  But I do.  Think all the time.  I want this summer to be the happiest the children ever had.  It’s the last for me.  That sounds consumptive, but I don’t mean that way.  I mean it’s my last Orphan summer.