Just what kind of water it was, I have never been able to recall. The missing adjective has worried me for years. All over the world I have lain awake at night skipping pebbles on the bay for hours and wondering whether the water was “shining” or “glassy” or “rippling” or “placid” or “deep blue.” Metrical exigencies of course insist that the name shall be writ in water of two syllables and I have often cajoled myself into a troubled sleep by almost deciding that this particular water must have been “pretty.” But even “pretty” lacks the certain completely vapid authenticity that ever eludes me. The blesséd play was ghastly enough but the blesséd work was torture. I was endowed with neither skill nor patience and at that time I could not lose my shyness before strangers except when I lost my temper. The public exhibition of my inability to “coördinate” was a daily anguish, and I do not yet understand how I ever at last achieved the unspeakably hideous mat of magenta and yellow paper that after the death of my grandmother I found spotlessly preserved among her most cherished possessions. But I not only did--I furthermore succeeded after days and days of agony in constructing a useless, wobbly, altogether horrible little house out of wire and dried peas. It was characteristic of Mrs. White to select from the comprehensive inventory of the world’s possible building materials, wire and dried peas. If Mrs. White had now and then betrayed the impatience, the annoyance, the despair she had every reason to experience over my stupidity and awkwardness, if at the “psychological moment” she had occasionally spoken sharply, blown me up as did the teachers later at the public school, the effect I am convinced would have been definite and salutary. But hers was the haggard benevolence of the child-gardener in its most indestructible form. All day long sweetness and light glared from her eyes like pharos rays that faileth not because they’ve been wound up. There was in the loving expression around her mouth something appallingly inanimate, objective, detachable; one felt that it hadn’t grown there, it had been put. It bore about the same relation to reality as does the art of the confectioner. It lay against her teeth like the thin white icing on a cake, and the hand that itched to box an ear faltered in its flight pausing to caress a curl. It terrified me to realize that the perishable, narrow strips of glazed, colored paper we tried to weave into mats, and the dried peas with which I finally builded better than I knew were, even as the hairs of our heads, all numbered. This was for the purpose of teaching us neatness and thrift--the husbanding of our resources. To crumple the former or scatter the latter was, we knew, a crime, but Mrs. White’s method of calling our attention to it was merely an insult to the intelligence. The punishment was a deliberate misfit, an elaborately artificial evasion of the point at issue. When, for instance, a dried pea would