Then, in answer to my startled look, she continued: “No, Bessie and I have never quarreled. I wouldn’t allow myself to do so. She is Tom’s wife, and he loves her to devotion. If I quarreled with Bessie Tom would have to take one side or the other. I wouldn’t want him to decide against his wife, and if he turned against me it would break my heart. So I try to bear my lot without complaining, but I can hardly help the feeling that I am a stranger in my own home. I have no longer any authority about the house. The pictures are no longer arranged as they were ten years ago. The portraits of the family no longer grace the walls of the downstairs rooms. Bessie says it is not fashionable, so the pictures of Tom’s father and my own, are banished to the narrow confines of my own bed room. “And my bedroom has been changed, too. I no longer sleep over the parlor, facing the public road. Bessie thought it would make such a pleasant spare room for visitors, so I was removed to the east room over the kitchen. When Bessie’s mother visits her she occupies my old room, while I must go off to my den over the kitchen. I may be selfish, though I pray God to keep me from thoughts that are narrow; but it does hurt an old woman to be thus set aside in her own home. “And no longer any callers or visitors come to see me. I’m a back number. Even you came to see Tom, and not me. I am a deposed ruler. My kingdom has been handed over to another and my own son is a subject of the new ruler. I never complain to Tom, because he does not understand. He thinks that I ought to be satisfied with things as they are, and maybe I should, for I have nothing to do. Well, nothing to do is the hardest life a person can live. I can go and come at will, but that is not enough to satisfy a woman. I long for the old home in which I was once an entity, a moving force, a working energy. “Where nothing is expected of the mother-in-law, she can expect nothing in return. I am reduced to an eating, drinking, sleeping non-entity. I once overheard Bessie tell a caller that I was getting queer. Maybe I am, for I certainly feel queer under present conditions. Neither responsibility nor authority rests on me. I am on the scrap pile, an unwilling supernumerary.