These pages are a record bearing on life and art and you. They say that life is long—long enough for pauses, long enough that haste is your only real sacrilege and the artist’s great outrage on life. They do not deny that the seasons are short, whether seed time and harvest or the mating of turtle doves and snails, or even the theatrical season or the press date; but they do define an attitude towards one’s work, and it’s the direct expression of the artist mind. Here is a protest against that haste that does what it may instead of refusing to do what it must not. And this is not youth saying I will do as I damn please, but judgment saying I will avoid doing what I please not; not a baby demanding the moon at all,—merely a proper young entity refusing a rotten piece of cheese. And as for its bearing on you, here is a record of existence, a record of a striving toward that happiness that comes through an understanding of life, a grip on life—the grip that Dauber didn’t have. You have life in your hands. You have everything. Never mind, you _have_. Something for your hands to dig into—a friendly attitude towards life, and an abiding faith. And these are the essentials. They are. Absolutely. They are the three essentials. A piano and a friend and one star—it’s enough. It’s all there is: something congenial for the hands (literally) to do when heart and mind can’t quite, quite get the grip on things; the capacity for friendship; and faith in one’s stuff. And I said no one could be as valiant as you looked! It’s easy to imagine your young god springing from the ranks of labor, and as for the oppression of family life I’m starting a subscription to establish a perfectly new ocean and build one big springboard for the proper launching of an army of sixteen year old girls that I see heading this way from a thousand typical American homes. God bless us, but your mind is a crystal stream out of the high hills. I can see it,—I who had the one perfect home in all the world, with a mother who was afraid I’d be hanged and a father who was afraid I wouldn’t, with grandfathers who painted all the world for me and a pair of grandmothers who made home better, with a brother to keep me beat up and a sister to mend my bones and bind me with bands of affection,—with all the loveliest ties and with freedom in everything from the first—if _I_ can see it who is there that can’t? Just to have a race free so they can have a friendly attitude toward life, with eyes for the marvel of it and half an understanding of each other—it’s such a little thing you ask because it’s what everybody really wants. Surely the world won’t have to be told it twice. Loyalty?—how it crowns the graces and means the thousand things never dreamed of in a marriage vow and the platitudes of family pride. Your loyalty to yourself this time will feed your individualistic marrow in its bones. I glory in your shame. Wuzzed Thinking _Anonymous_: