She sits in the sun by an open window, and has egg and sherry at eleven and before she goes home, but the sands of her life are slipping fast. She lives in a room with three other consumptive sisters. The eldest went out one night to get some oil for their lamp. It is now ten days, and she has not returned. Is she working in the powder-mills, or what? Who will care, and who could if he would inform himself of her fate--just gone out into the night. Madame Bonilla, from whom I got Josefina, has been an angel of mercy to her and her sisters, and tried unsuccessfully to rearrange their housing, inviting Josefina to live at her country place and supply her with work. But one can only battle so far with Indian situations. After a certain point everything seems to slip away into mystery, racial and individual. Does not constitutional democracy seem a snare and a delusion if two-thirds of the population are composed of such? It brings a smile, but of despair, to the face. My very good Indian washer-woman, not long ago, left me. The usual excuse of an aunt or a grandmother, or some one being ill or dead, was not used. She just stood there with her three children, clutching the ends of her rebozo, that the last, fat little baby was rolled up in, and repeated that she must return at once to her pueblo whose Indian name I didn't catch. She had a sort of an antique, troubled look. I asked Cecilia if she knew what the matter was. She answered the usual "_Pués quién sabe, Señora?_" We got some things together for the children, and I gave her a few _pesos_, and she went off, out of my life, out of the security of food and lodging that was hers, to melt into the endless generations of Indians; I felt uncomfortable for long after. Talking about housework, I wish some of the airy stipendiaries of other climes, or even the women of those sections of my native land where they don't have "help," could really know what it is here, where half the female energies of the nation are engaged in the grinding of corn. They don't do it occasionally, but every day, and hour after hour, or the nation would starve. It's one of the most appalling things in Mexico, this grinding of the mother literally between the upper and nether stones. How can a nation advance when the greater part of the women pass their lives grinding corn, making tortillas, and bearing children? There is no time or strength left to sketch in the merest outline of home-making, let alone a personal life, or any of the rudiments of citizenship. _April 26th._ Yours about the catastrophe in the Bay of Tangier is received. My heart aches. To think of parents being brought back out of the darkness of death by drowning, to call for _three_ children and find nothing! It is Greek, terrible. You remember them from Berlin days and those lovely little ones.