The upshot of it all was I had to drop my music, not only then, he advised, but for all time. I had too emotional a temperament, he said, to stand the strain. (What kind of a musician would a non-emotional person be!) But he was wise in prohibiting it then. I used to dignify the severe headaches which I had at that time by saying I had “brain fever.” (Girls in the books I read had “brain fever.”) But there was no real illness, no staying out of school, though for a time my hours were lessened. Dropping music was a real cross to me. Probably, had I been allowed to resume it, I should have followed that as a vocation and not cast about for another field of work. Although discontinuing the study of music, I did not drop its practice. Music was an important part of our home life. I remember how cruel I once thought my parents because they would not let me go to a distant county to pick hops. One of the schoolgirls had gone with her mother the year before, had earned a lot, and had had a “splendid time.” As the season came round again, I “teased” to go with this girl and her mother. I was hearing a good deal at home about economy, economy, and Nora’s account of the money she had made had fired me with the prospect of earning great sums to relieve our growing needs. Confident, I announced my plan. Was ever a girl so repulsed, so silenced? They wouldn’t even hear me out. I tried to say what Nora said, and what her mother said, but they were obdurate. A martyr in my own eyes for a time, it was probably years before I realized what I had asked to do. When I learned what class of young people usually engaged in such work, I understood how “out of the question” (a finality of Father’s) it had been for my parents even to discuss the project. I remembered, too, how the same bright-eyed Nora had soon left school; how she changed in manner; became coarsened; drifted out of our lives. Strange how, years after, children become aware of the safeguards thrown around them in youth! With this awareness, what a feeling of gratitude wells up within one toward the parents who have surrounded them with such wise and loving care! How one longs to fly home and tell them of it; yet how reticent are we, how chary of expressing this gratitude! One of the deepest of my early griefs was when we first learned what it was as a family to be separated; when Brother, who was a printer, went to Colorado to work. We had been so closely bound together. I realized the anxiety of our parents, divined the loneliness Arthur would feel, and what it would mean to lose him from the home. What interesting and humorous letters he wrote us, with the homesickness sometimes peeping through! How we read and re-read them!