Last night in bed I got to thinking about old Jess, and wondering how she was making out with that bunch up there, and I almost rolled out at the way her nose must be turning up inside of her at some of the things she was seeing and hearing and had to take part in; and I laughed so loud that Miss Susanna came in my room to see if anything were the matter.  I told her no, and that I was just thinking of something, so she pattered back, and I put my face in the pillow to keep her from hearing me again.  But it was hard not to let it come out.  Mother’s daughters are a mixture all right, and no more alike than if they weren’t related to one another.  Being a parent must be an anxious job.  I hope I will have a dozen children, but they’ll probably be right much to manage.  If I turn out to be a childless old maid, I’ll adopt a boy and girl, anyhow.  I can do that if I can’t do anything else.

Jessica is the clever one of our family.  Florine has the beauty and Jessica the brains, and so far nothing has shown signs in me, but something may turn up yet.  Jessica is an A.M., and she has Ideas and Views and Opinions which she isn’t stingy with and lets anybody have who is within hearing, and she wanted to be something, have a Career and get an Identity, which she says a woman has no chance of doing as long as she sinks herself in marriage; but Father said she couldn’t go to any more colleges until she had had a fling at fun, for it wasn’t fair to Mother.  She came out last winter and had a fearful rush because she was so different from the other girls.

I don’t believe Jessica would ever have wasted a winter doing the things she did last year if she hadn’t wanted to see for herself what was in it, anyhow, in society I mean, so she took a header and plunged all right.  She says she has a scientific and analytical mind and she worked it all out—­the number of hours and days and weeks and months she had spent flopping around from one party to another, and doing the things she was supposed to do, and saying the things she wasn’t supposed to say, and then she estimated the cost in time and strength and money and wear and tear on her character, and announced that it wasn’t a paying business, and at the end of the year she was going to get out.  The year won’t be up until October and that is why she is with Mother and Florine this summer.

What she is going in for when it is up I don’t believe she knows herself, yet.  She says woman to-day is in the most unsettled and uncertain state that any animal has ever been in since the first one, a mollusk, or something without a backbone started to get one.  And that it will take time for woman to evolute into being the best kind of a human being she is capable of becoming, and that the next step in the evoluting is to get out of her head some of the foolishness put in it by men people who didn’t know what they were talking about.  Mother thinks it fearful in her to talk as she does, and can’t