The wind tears around the corner of my room on the bias and the cats keep up a Thomas Concert beneath my windows all night long. No wonder I have nightmares. Last night I dreamed that I was a saint with an apple pie for a halo--this boarding house pie habit will eventually tell on the strongest nerves. Last night I cut my leg on a barbed wire--no dear I wasn't hurdling the fence--the wire was on the side walk, where everything except the kitchen stove usually lies. I hope I won't have lockjaw--it's harder on a woman than it is on a man anytime. I was just thinking how clever it would be, if a man who had a chattering wife, would keep a bunch of rusty pins on hand. I sat down to the piano this morning and ran through that pyrotechnical _Solfigetto_ by the other Bach, and Father Time, who sat enchanted, said, "You and the piano has met before." It's a shame to cheat the aged. Thank heaven that the sunshine is free and that the florist's window is gratis to look at, otherwise on my slender means I should have to take advantage of the bankrupt law. My old friend Insomnia again stands incessantly at the foot of my bed and bids me corner the sunrise market. A heavy heart is mine tonight and though I try to fancy beautiful pictures in the crystal ball of the future, I grow sick with anticipation as the visions fall away before they are half formed, leaving me melancholy and wondering if there is an angel somewhere who collects the sighs of such ever-repressed feeling. Goodnight, MARIANNE. October 5. Lorna Dear: Well, Lorna, you and I were "all day suckers" to believe that Mrs. Phyllis Lathrop was touring California; I bumped plump into her yesterday in front of the poor-house. No, dear, I did not go there to stay, merely to visit. Phyllis is nice in her red-headed way and looked very fresh and sweet with the lower part of her face lost in a tulle abyss. She lives just a whisper away from me--so strange I haven't seen her before. She's trotting around with a Sioux Falls fellow who looks like a Dutch luncheon favor. Every time he lifts his hat I look for bon-bons to drop out. Says she must be loving someone all the time, even if she is considered in the light of an accommodation train. She's the unfinished sort of a woman who carries her beauty around in little tubes and seems so used to audiences that I always feel that she must have sung between the acts.