So we have come to belong to what the French would call the school of “pleine air.”  I once knew an adorable little boy who expressed it better than I can: 

    “Sun callin’ me, sky callin’ me,
     Comin’ sun—­comin’ sky.”

[Illustration]

AN ADVENTURE IN SOLITUDE

My windows were all wide open one lovely April day, the loveliest time of all the year in Southern California, filling the house with the sweetness of wistaria and orange blossoms, but also, truth compels me to add, with so many noises of such excruciating kinds that I followed Ulysses’ well-known plan and then tried to find quiet for my siesta in the back spare-room.  The worst of this house is that it really has no back—­it has various fronts, like the war.  The spinster next door but one has a parrot—­a cynical, tired parrot, but still fond of the sound of his own voice.  The lady across the street is raising Pekinese puppies, who apparently bitterly regret being born outside of Pekin.  She puts them in baskets on the roof in the sun and lets them cry it out, in that hard-hearted modern method applied to babies.

A sight-seeing car had paused while the gentleman with the megaphone explained to a few late tourists the Arroyo Seco, that great river-bed with only a trickle of water at the bottom, on whose brink our house perches.  At home two plumbers were playfully tossing bricks about our courtyard in a half-hearted endeavor to find out why our cellar was flooded.  Hence the back bedroom.  No amount of cotton wool in one’s ears, however, could camouflage a telephone bell.

“The Red Cross Executive Committee will meet at ten on Wednesday.”

A short interval followed.  “Will Mr. S——­ make a ‘four-minute’ speech on Friday at the Strand Theatre for the Liberty Bond Campaign?”

Another interval during which I began to feel drowsy.  “Will Mr. S——­ say a few words of appreciation and present a wrist watch to the Chapter Secretary just starting for France?” etc.  Just here I made a resolve.  Escape I would, for one week, to my lovely hill-top by the sea, and leave J——­, the two boys, the two dogs, the two white mice, the Red Cross, the Red Star, Food Conservation and Liberty Bonds to manage beautifully without me.  I even had the reckless idea of trying to forget that there was a war going on!  I was furnished with a perfectly good excuse; we had rented “The Smiling Hill-Top” for two months, and it must be put in order.  Hence my “Adventure in Solitude.”

Everything is called an adventure nowadays, and to me it was a most exciting one, as I had not gone forth independently for many years.  One chauffeur, one smiling Helen to clean house for the tenants and cook for me, my worst clothes and my best picnic lunch went into the motor, and I followed.  I think my family expected me back next day, when I bade them a loving farewell.  Not I!  My spirit was craving silence.  I wanted not to curl my hair or be neat or polite or a good mother, or any of the things I usually try to be, for just one week.  Longer, and I would be lonely and homesick.