I decided then to be a writer of plays first, and then later on to act in them. I would thus be able to say what came into my head, as it was my own play. Also to arrange the scenes so as to wear a variety of gowns, including evening things. I spent the rest of the afternoon manicuring my nails in our state room. Well, we got there at last. It was a large house, but everything was to thin about it. The school will understand this, the same being the condition of the new freshman dormitory. The walls were to thin, and so were the floors. The doors shivered in the wind, and palpitated if you slammed them. Also you could hear every sound everywhere. I looked around me in despair. Where, oh where, was I to find my cherished solitude? Where? On account of Hannah hating a new place, and considering the house an insult to the servants, especially only one bathroom for the lot of them, she let me unpack alone, and so far I was safe. But where was I to work? Fate settled that for me however. There is no armor against fate; Death lays his icy hand on Kings. J. Shirley; Dirge. Previously, however, mother and I had had a talk. She sailed into my room one evening, dressed for dinner, and found me in my ROBE DE NUIT, curled up in the window seat admiring the view of the ocean. "Well!" she said. "Is this the way you intend going to dinner?" "I do not care for any dinner," I replied. Then, seeing she did not understand, I said coldly. "How can I care for food, mother, when the sea looks like a dying opal?" "Dying pussycat!" mother said, in a very nasty way. "I don't know what has come over you, Barbara. You used to be a normal child, and there was some accounting for what you were going to do. But now! Take off that nightgown, and I'll have Tanney hold off dinner for half an hour." Tanney was the butler who had taken Patrick's place. "If you insist," I said coldly. "But I shall not eat." "Why not?" "You wouldn't understand, mother." "Oh, I wouldn't? Well, suppose I try," she said, and sat down. "I am not very intelligent, but if you put it clearly I may grasp it. Perhaps you'd better speak slowly, also." So, sitting there in my room, while the sea throbbed in tireless beats against the shore, while the light faded and the stars issued, one by one, like a rash on the face of the sky, I told mother of my dreams. I intended, I said, to write life as it really is, and not as supposed to be. "It may in places be, ugly" I said, "but truth is my banner. The truth is never ugly, because it is real. It is, for instance, not ugly if a man is in love with the wife of another, if it is real love, and not the passing fancy of a moment." Mother opened her mouth, but did not say anything. "There was a time," I said, "when I longed for things that now have no value whatever to me. I cared for clothes and even for the attentions of the other sex. But that has passed away, mother. I have now no thought but for my career."