no matter who starved, and Peter feels that way, too.  Of course we both realize that we’re not living here in this hole, we’re simply existing, and nothing matters very much until we get out of it.  In six months, when Charles Edward is twenty-five, there’s a little money coming to him—­three thousand dollars—­and then we’re going to Paris to live our own lives; but nobody knows anything about that.  One day I said something, without thinking, to my mother-in-law about that money; I’ve forgotten what it was, but she looked so horrified and actually gasped: 

“You wouldn’t think of Charles Edward’s using his principal, Lorraine?”

And I said:  “Why not?  It’s his own principal.”

Well, I just made up my mind afterward that I’d never open my mouth again, while I live here, about anything I was interested in, even about Peter!

His father might have let him go to Paris that year before we met, when he was in New York at the Art League, just as well as not, but the family all consulted about it, Peter says, and concluded it wasn’t “necessary.”  That is the blight that is always put on everything we want to do—­it isn’t necessary.  Oh, how Alice hates that word!  She says she supposes it’s never “necessary” to be happy.

Well, Peter heard that when the Paris scheme came up—­he’d written home that he couldn’t work without the art atmosphere—­Grandmother Evarts said: 

“Why, I’m sure he has the Metropolitan Museum to go to; and there’s Wanamaker’s picture-gallery, too.  Has he been to Wanamaker’s?”

I thought I should throw a fit when Peter told me that!

I know, of course, that the family pity Peter for living in a house that’s all at sixes and sevens, and for not having everything the way he has been used to having it; and I know they think I keep him from going to see them all at home, when the truth is—­although, as usual, I can’t say it—­sometimes I absolutely have to hound him to go there; though, of course, he’s awfully fond of them all, and his mother especially; but he gets dreadfully lazy, and says they’re his own people, anyway, and he can do as he pleases about it.  It’s their own fault, because they’ve always spoiled him.  And if they only knew how he hates just that way of living he’s been always used to, with its little, petty cast-iron rules and regulations, and the stupid family meals, where everybody is expected to be on time to the minute!  My father-in-law pulls out his chair at the dinner-table exactly as the clock is striking one, and if any member of the family is a fraction late all the rest are solemn and strained and nervous until the culprit appears.  Peter says the way he used to suffer—­he was never on time.

The menu for each day of the week is as fixed as fate, no matter what the season of the year:  hot roast beef, Sunday; cold roast beef, Monday; beef-steak, Tuesday; roast mutton, Wednesday; mutton pot-pie, Thursday; corned beef, Friday; and beef-steak again on Saturday.  My father-in-law never eats fish or poultry, so they only have either if there is state company.  There’s one sacred apple pudding that’s been made every Wednesday for nineteen years, and if you can imagine anything more positively dreadful than that, I can’t.