Then Harry and Peter concluded that it was too late to go to bed at all—­it was really daylight—­so they took bath-towels and went down to the river and had a swim, and Harry slipped back to the house at six o’clock.  He said we’d repeat it all the next night, but of course we didn’t.  He’s the kind that, as soon as he’s promised to do a thing, feels at once that he doesn’t really want to do it.

The next day Peter’s Aunt Elizabeth came on the scene, and of course we stayed away as much as we could.  She loves Peter—­they all do—­but she hasn’t any use for me, and shows it.  She thinks I’m perfectly dumb and stupid.  I simply don’t exist, and I’ve never tried to undeceive her—­it’s too much trouble.  She always wants to tell people how to do their hair and put on their clothes.

Miss Elizabeth Talbert is a howling swell; she only just endures it here.  I’ve heard lots of things about her from Bell Pickering, who knows the Munroes—­Lily Talbert, they call her there.  She thinks she’s fond of Art, but she really doesn’t know the first thing about it—­she doesn’t like anything that isn’t expensive and elegant and a la mode.

The only time she ever came to see me she actually picked her way around the house when I was showing it to her—­there’s no other word to use—­just because there was a glass of jelly on the sofa, and the painting things were all over the studio with Peter’s clothes.  I perfectly hated her that day, yet I do love to look at her, and I can see how she might be terribly nice if you were any one she thought worth caring for.  There have been times when I’ve seen a look on her face, like the clear ethereal light beyond the sunset, that just pulled at me.  She is very fond of Peggy; I know she would never do anything to injure Peggy.

Poor little Peggy!  When I think of this affair about Harry Goward I don’t believe she ever felt sure of him; that is why she is so worked up over this matter now.  I know there was something that I felt from the first through all her excitement, something that wasn’t quite happy in her happiness.  I feel atmospheres at once; I just can’t help it.  And when I get feeling other people’s atmospheres too much I lose my own, and then I can’t paint.  I began so well the other day with the picture of that Armenian peddler, and now since Alice left I can’t do a thing with it; his bare yellow knees look just like ugly grape-fruit.  I wish Sally was in.  She can’t cook, but she can do a song-and-dance that’s worth its weight in gold when you’re down in the mouth.

—­Just then I looked out of the window and saw my mother-in-law coming in.  For a minute I was frightened.  I’d never seen her look like that before—­so white and almost old; she seemed hardly able to walk, and I ran to the door and helped her in, and put her in a chair and her feet on a footstool, and got her my dear little Venetian bottle of smelling-salts with the long silver chain; it’s so beautiful it makes you feel better just to look at it.  I whisked Peter’s shoes out into the hall, and when I sat down by her she put her hand out to me and said, “Dear child,” and I got all throaty, the way I do when any one speaks like that to me, for, oh, I have been lonesome for Dad and Momsey and my own dear home! though no one ever seems to imagine it, and I said: