We are going to be vegetarians this summer. Papa, who hasn't tried it yet, is perfectly willing, and if we live chiefly on nuts and lettuces we shall hardly want any money at all. I read Shelley's _Vindication of Natural Diet_ aloud to him before we left the flat to prepare his mind, and he not only heartily agreed with every word, but went at once to the Free Library and dug out all the books he could find about muscles and brains and their surprising dependence on the kind of stuff you have eaten, and brought them home for me to study. I do love Papa. He falls in so sweetly with one's little plans, and lets me do what I want without the least waste of time in questionings or the giving of advice. I have read the books with profound interest. Only a person who cooks, who has to handle meat when it is raw, pick out the internals of geese, peel off the skins of rabbits, scrape away the scales of a fish that is still alive--my step-mother insisted on this, the flavor, she said, being so infinitely superior that way--can know with what a relief, what a feeling of personal purification and turning of the back on evil, one flings a cabbage into a pot of fair water or lets one's fingers linger lovingly among lentils. I brought a bag of lentils up the hill with us, and the cabbage, remnant of my last marketing, came up too in a net, and we had our dinner today of them: lentil soup, and cabbage with bread-and-butter--what could be purer? And for Johanna, who has not read Shelley, there was the last of the Rauchgasse sausage for the soothing of her more immature soul. That was an hour ago, and Papa has just been in to say he is hungry. 'Why, you've only just had dinner, Papachen,' said I, surprised. 'I know--I know,' he said, looking vaguely troubled. 'You can't really be hungry. Perhaps it's indigestion.' 'Perhaps,' agreed Papa; and drifted out again, still looking troubled.