I picked Dicky up that day and kissed the anger out of her flaming little face, and a few minutes later I heard her say in the voice that makes us wax in Dicky’s hands, “I was just a little angry with you, Mammy, and I asked Mr. Devil to burn you up—but I’m not mad now, and I hope he won’t.” Dicky went to New York. We knew that she would. That’s why John and I, dear faithful old mammy, too, were so helpless, our hearts contracting in fear. _August 13th. Sunday Night._ Scientists tell us that a change that is slow but complete takes place in the human body every seven years. They are wrong about the process. It happens in the twinkling of an eye—like that change in the far-off judgment day of which the Bible tells. I know. This very day it happened to me. This Sabbath morning I waked a healthy, happy, normal spinster behind whom lay, except for this anxiety Dicky gives, almost thirty barren-of-emotion years. Breakfast was not ready when I came down, so I rushed up the lane. If we lived more pretentiously it would be the drive. Beyond lay the white road that leads up to Marsville and trails round the mountain and out to a wider life. The hills that neighbour with the blue ether were shaking night-caps of trailing mist from their heads. The mountain world breathed deep of August—proclaimed it exultantly in its vivid summer green as yet untouched by change; in its full-eared, ripening corn, massed on the hills like troops of soldiers. The insect shrills were August noises as were the lazy little chirps of the birds that have forgotten their joyous outpourings of spring. I loved it all—even the crow circling majestically about the distant hills so far away that his raucous cry came musically—and all of it contented me. Quite forgetting my approaching thirtieth birthday I threw a kiss to that mountain on the skyline that is so like a camel with a humpy back. There’s always been a secret understanding between that mountain and me, I suppose it is left over from my young girlhood, I was only eighteen the first time I saw Camel Back, that some day he would dump all his treasures into my lap—treasures from all the lands of the East. Yesterday I got another editor’s check—Camel Back has always held me steady under my rejections, hence the salute. Down through the ages how the world would have laughed if the Egyptians had made their Sphinx a man—wise Egyptians. As I threw the kiss to my mountain the shadow of no man was on my heart, or had ever been, but I felt the thrill of life’s infinite mystery and promise—felt it and called it an editor’s check. At thirty a spinster woman may begin to run to fat, or she may show tendencies to shrivel, but I boldly declare, my knowledge dating back some dozen hours, that her heart is unwrinkled, ridiculously young, and scanning the horizon for Eastern treasures that the camels that