I need not go on enumerating my activities.  Every one has been doing the same thing, and in all probability is now enjoying the same sense of orderliness and freedom that I feel.  Even the children have caught the spirit.  I was just leaving my house the other day when a palatial automobile stopped at the gate and a very perfect chauffeur alighted and touched his cap.  “Madam,” he said, “I have come for a case of empty bottles that Master John says your little boy promised him for the Red Cross.”  There was a trace of embarrassment in his manner, but there was none in mine as I led him to the cellar and watched with satisfaction while he clasped a cobwebby box of—­dare I whisper it?—­empty beer bottles to his immaculate chest and eventually stowed it in the exquisite interior of the limousine.  How wonderful of the Red Cross to want my bottles, and how intelligent of my “little boy” to arrange the matter so pleasantly!

To do away with the needless accumulations of life, or better still, not to let them accumulate, what a comfort that would be!  Letters?  The fire as rapidly as possible!  No one ought to have a good time reading over old letters—­there’s always a tinge of sadness about them, and it’s morbid to conserve sadness, added to which, in the remote contingency of one’s becoming famous, some vandalish relative always publishes the ones that are most sacred.

J——­ has the pigeon-hole habit.  He hates to see anything sink into the abyss of the waste-basket, but I am training him to throw away something every morning before breakfast.  After a while he’ll get so that he can dispose of several things at once, and the time may come when I’ll have to look over the rubbish to be sure that nothing valuable has gone, because throwing away is just as insidious a habit as any other.

If only one could pile old bills on top of the old letters, what a glorious bonfire that would make!  But that will have to wait until the millennium; as things are now, it would mean paying twice for the motor fender of last year, and never feeling sure of your relations with the butcher.

It isn’t only things that I am disposing of.  I’ve rid myself of a lot of useless ideas.  We don’t have to live in any special way.  It isn’t necessary to have meat twice a day, and there is no law about chicken for Sunday dinner.  Butter does not come like the air we breathe.  Numerous courses aren’t necessary even for guests.  New clothes aren’t essential unless your old ones are worn out—­and so on.

And so I’m stepping forth on a road leading, even the graybeards can’t say where, with surprises behind every hedge and round every corner.  There hasn’t been so thrillingly interesting an age to be alive since that remote time when the Creation was going on.  Except for moments of tired nerves, like this, it is very stimulating, and I find myself stepping out much more briskly since I threw my extra wraps and bundles beside the road.  Here on my hill-top I have even enjoyed a little of that charm of unencumberedness that all vagabonds know—­and later if I come to some steep stretches I shall be more likely to make the top, for I’m resolved to “travel light.”