“Happy?” I pondered.  “Well, after all, what is happiness?”

He took a spell of coughing then, and when it was over he put his arms around me and was quite afectionate.

“What a queer little rat it is!” he said.

I only repeat this to show how even my father, with all his afection and good qualities, did not understand and never would understand.  My Heart was full of a longing to be understood.  I wanted to tell him my yearnings for better things, my aspirations to make my life a great and glorious thing.  And he did not understand.

He gave me five dollars instead.  Think of the Tradgedy of it!

As we went along, and he pulled my ear and finaly went asleep with a hand on my shoulder, the bareness of my Life came to me.  I shook with sobs.  And outside somewhere Sis and mother made Dinner lists.  Then and there I made up my mind to work hard and acheive, to become great and powerful, to write things that would ring the Hearts of men—­and women, to, of course—­and to come back to them some day, famous and beautiful, and when they sued for my love, to be kind and hauty, but cold.  I felt that I would always be cold, although gracious.

I decided then to be a writer of plays first, and then later on to act in them.  I would thus be able to say what came into my head, as it was my own play.  Also to arrange the seens so as to wear a variety of gowns, including evening things.  I spent the rest of the afternoon manacuring my nails in our state room.

Well, we got there at last.  It was a large house, but everything was to thin about it.  The School will understand this, the same being the condition of the new Freshman dormitory.  The walls were to thin, and so were the floors.  The Doors shivered in the wind, and palpatated if you slamed them.  Also you could hear every Sound everywhere.

I looked around me in dispair.  Where, oh where, was I to find my cherished solatude?  Where?

On account of Hannah hating a new place, and considering the house an insult to the Servants, especialy only one bathroom for the lot of them, she let me unpack alone, and so far I was safe.  But where was I to work?  Fate settled that for me however.

     There is no armour against fate;
     Death lays his icy hand on Kings.

     J. Shirley; Dirge.

Previously, however, mother and I had had a talk.  She sailed into my room one evening, dressed for dinner, and found me in my robe de nuit, curled up in the window seat admiring the view of the ocean.

“Well!” she said.  “Is this the way you intend going to dinner?”

“I do not care for any dinner,” I replied.  Then, seeing she did not understand, I said coldly.  “How can I care for food, mother, when the Sea looks like a dying ople?”

“Dying pussycat!” mother said, in a very nasty way.  “I don’t know what has come over you, Barbara.  You used to be a normle Child, and there was some accounting for what you were going to do.  But now!  Take off that nightgown, and I’ll have Tanney hold off dinner for half an hour.”