for years and years.  But when they all stop talking the minute I come into a room, and when mamma and Peggy go around with red eyes and won’t say why, you’d better believe I don’t like it.  It fills me with the “intelligent discontent” Tom is always talking about.  Then I don’t rest until I know what there is to know, and usually when I get through I know more than anybody else does, because I’ve got all the different sides—­Maria’s and Tom’s and Lorraine’s and Charles Edward’s and mamma’s and papa’s and grandma’s and Peggy’s and Aunt Elizabeth’s.  It isn’t that they intend to tell me things, either; they all try not to.  Every one of them keeps her own secrets beautifully, but she drops things about the others.  Then all I have to do is to put them together like a patch-work quilt.

You needn’t think it’s easy, though, for the very minute I get near any of the family they waste most of the time we’re together by trying to improve me.  You see, they are all so dreadfully old that they have had time to find out their faults and youthful errors, and every single one of them thinks she sees all her faults in me, and that she must help me to conquer them ere it is too late.  Aunt Elizabeth says they mean it kindly, and perhaps they do.  But if you have ever had ten men and women trying to improve you, you will know what my life is.  Tom Price, who married my sister Maria, told Dr. Denbigh once that “every time a Talbert is unoccupied he or she puts Alice or Billy, or both, on the family moulding-board and kneads awhile.”  I heard him say it and it’s true.  All I can say is that if they keep on kneading and moulding me much longer there won’t be anything left but a kind of a pulpy mass.  I can see what they have done to Billy already; he’s getting pulpier every day, and I don’t believe his brain would ever work if I didn’t keep stirring it up.

However, the thing I want to say while I think of it is this.  It is a question, and I will ask it here because there is no use of asking it at home:  Why is it that grown-up men and women never have anything really interesting to say to a girl fifteen years old?  Then, if you can answer that, I wish you would answer another:  Why don’t they ever listen or understand what a girl means when she talks to them?  Billy and I have one rule now when we want to say something serious.  We get right in front of them and fix them with a glittering eye, the way the Ancient Mariner did, you know, and speak as slowly as we can, in little bits of words, to show them it’s very important.  Then, sometimes, they pay attention and answer us, but usually they act as if we were babies gurgling in cunning little cribs.  And the rude way they interrupt us often and go on talking about their own affairs—­well, I will not say more, for dear mamma has taught me not to criticise my elders, and I never do.  But I watch them pretty closely, just the same, and when I see them doing something that is not right my brain works so hard it keeps me awake nights.  If it’s anything very dreadful, like Peggy’s going and getting engaged, I point out the error, the way they’re always pointing errors out to me.  Of course it doesn’t do any good, but that isn’t my fault.  It’s because they haven’t got what my teacher calls “receptive minds.”