The days drift by like dull-hued birds. There’s not a song in the throat of a single one. Dull-hued is the word, for the rains have washed the colour from the hills. And like a giant graystone prison wall the mountains, desolate, rattlesnaky things, stand against the sky. Jack the Giant Killer himself couldn’t scale them. Mammy watches me anxiously. She says I am sick. I am—sick for a bigger life. Teaching is routine after twelve years. I haven’t any worry. Dicky since her “Personal” escapade is being good, unless some mischief is brewing she has not yet got into trouble over. Some day—not this dull-eyed day—I mean to put to myself the question, “Why have you never said one word to Robert Haralson about Dicky—poor, cooped-up, lonely little Dicky?” And I mean to get an honest answer. _Friday. December 21st._ The gods on Mount Olympus, if it be they that control gray, heavy-lidded days like these, had compassion on me and let to-day be Friday. I’d have killed all the children in another day, and now I have until Monday to get back to something akin to normal. I must have looked my mood when I came in, for poor old mammy had brought me hot toast and tea and delicious peach jam. I received it with gratitude, but when she began the recital of that well-known story in which she stood and received my great aunt’s false teeth in her last hour, when she launched into my great uncle’s handing them to her with the words, “Give these into the hands of this faithful servant,” I leaped up so abruptly that I frightened her. I wonder if I really meant to pitch the dear, faithful old soul out the window? I am developing temperament, or is it temper? Perhaps it is all due to the outside world. The snow sifts bleakly from a bleak sky. What am I to do with these walled-round-by-winter days? What am I to do with this woman whose outward appearance is mine? She terrifies me. For thirty years I’ve tended my little garden plot of life in placid content; cheerfully I’ve hoed my bean and cabbage rows. Now I want to dynamite these homely plants. Where the cabbages stand in rows I want red roses; I can’t abide beans a minute longer, and in their stead I would like purple orchids. And there’s something else I want: I want to cry and cry on a broad man shoulder—not John’s shoulder. Half timidly I glance over my own shoulder as I write it. My own mother never kissed my father until after they were married, and my grandmother all her life long dressed and undressed behind the shelter of the door of the great wardrobe that is here in my room this very minute, but no reproachful ghosts are gazing at me. And if all the spinsters in this broad land with their battle cry of freedom and suffrage (I’ve got freedom and I’m willing for suffrage) had had the sort of day I’ve had with the children—it’s been a wild beast of a day and its sharp claws have drawn blood—when twilight came they would do just what I am doing now.