On the train I had a very unpleasant experience, due to Sis opening my suitcase to look for a magazine, and drawing out a soiled gentleman's collar. She gave me a very piercing glance, but said nothing and at the next opportunity I threw it out of a window, concealed in a newspaper. We now approach the catastrophe. My book on play writing divides plays into Introduction, Development, Crisis, Denouement and Catastrophe. And so one may divide life. In my case the cinder proved the introduction, as there was none other. I consider that the suitcase was the development, my showing it to Jane Raleigh was the crisis, and the denouement or catastrophe occurred later on. Let us then proceed to the catastrophe. Jane Raleigh came to see me off at the train. Her family was coming the next day. And instead of flowers, she put a small bundle into my hands. "Keep it hidden, Bab," she said, "and tear up the card." I looked when I got a chance, and she had crocheted me a wash cloth, with a pink edge. "For your linen chest," the card said, "and I'm doing a bath towel to match." I tore up the card, but I put the wash cloth with the other things I was trying to hide, because it is bad luck to throw a gift away. But I hoped, as I seemed to be getting more things to conceal all the time, that she would make me a small bath towel, and not the sort as big as a bed spread. Father went with us to get us settled, and we had a long talk while mother and Sis made out lists for dinners and so forth. "Look here, Bab," he said, "something's wrong with you. I seem to have lost my only boy, and have got instead a sort of tear-y young person I don't recognize." "I'm growing up, father" I said. I did not mean to rebuke him, but ye gods! Was I the only one to see that I was no longer a child? "Sometimes I think you are not very happy with us." "Happy?" I pondered. "Well, after all, what is happiness?" He took a spell of coughing then, and when it was over he put his arms around me and was quite affectionate. "What a queer little rat it is!" he said. I only repeat this to show how even my father, with all his affection and good qualities, did not understand and never would understand. My heart was full of a longing to be understood. I wanted to tell him my yearnings for better things, my aspirations to make my life a great and glorious thing. AND HE DID NOT UNDERSTAND. He gave me five dollars instead. Think of the tragedy of it! As we went along, and he pulled my ear and finally went asleep with a hand on my shoulder, the bareness of my life came to me. I shook with sobs. And outside somewhere Sis and mother made dinner lists. Then and there I made up my mind to work hard and achieve, to become great and powerful, to write things that would ring the hearts of men--and women, to, of course--and to come back to them some day, famous and beautiful, and when they sued for my love, to be kind and haughty, but cold. I felt that I would always be cold, although gracious.