Sometimes I'm really worried about him, he's so _indifferent_! He never jokes any more, and doesn't try to get any patients, though I _know_ he could get lots with his reputation. He seems despondent, Tommy, and sometimes doesn't even come in for his office-hour--and the other day he lost a patient that way that the Finchmans sent, she waited half an hour and then went! But though he may have liked the country life better; and let us all _vegetate_; that can't be it--for he certainly made no objection when the family _consensus_ seemed to be that we should move here! Of course, we have to face the fact that he and mother aren't very _congenial_, it is her problem, and while I wouldn't criticize mother for worlds and she certainly does her duty as wife and mother--I do think it's a _great mistake_ for her to always make her attitude a sort of _reproach_, saying how "she's sacrificed herself to him" and all--you know what I mean-- Mother really gets along better than any of us--especially as I now do _all_ the work of the entire house! The young writer paused, staring chillily at the register. She rarely looked out the window now, hers being the blank certainty that there would be nothing to see. Moreover, it was dusk. So, rising presently, she lighted the gas, and resumed her sad sisterly letter. Of her mother she wrote in some detail: of the various friends of her girlhood she had renewed acquaintance with, and how she was always exchanging calls with Cousin This or Martha That, who was So-and-So before she married. To Angela, it had really seemed funny how all these connections of her mother's, whose social possibilities they had so often discussed before they left Mitchellton, had resolved themselves into dejected old ladies who had had unhappy marriages, and whose children had also had unhappy marriages, as a rule, or were in some other way unavailable as friends. Out of five families thus exhumed by Mrs. Flower, positively only one unattached young person had emerged, and this one, named Jennie Finchman (!), while certainly well-meaning, was a shy, anxious, painfully homely little thing who had never had a good time in her life, and gave all her pocket-money to a mission in the Dutch East Indies.