cosy sounds.  I don’t.  Then I cut out the usual items from my bill of fare, and lived on young peas, asparagus, eggs, milk, and fruit, with just a little bread and butter—­not enough to agitate Mr. Hoover.  I never had had as much asparagus as I really wanted before.  I wore an old smock and a disreputable hat, and I pruned and dug in my garden till I was tired, and then I lay on the terrace and watched the waves endlessly gather and glide and spread.  Counting sheep jumping over a wall is nothing to compare with waves for soothing rasped nerves.

My first solitary day was so clear that the Pasadena Mountains, as we call that part of the Sierra Madre, rose soft over the water on the far horizon, so that I couldn’t feel lonely with home in sight.  Long unused muscles expostulated with me, but smoothed-out nerves more than balanced their twinges.  Of course I couldn’t forget the war.  Who could, especially with flocks of aeroplanes flying over me as I lay on a chaise longue on the terrace, listening to the big guns of Camp Kearny roaring behind the hills; but it no longer gave me the sensation of sand-paper in my feelings.  I thought about it all more calmly and realized a little of what it is doing to us Americans—­to our souls!—­that is worth the price; and in addition, how much it is teaching us of economy, conservation, and efficiency, as well as more spiritual things.

It has also brought home to me the beauty of throwing away.  In a fever of enthusiasm to make every outgrown union suit and superfluous berry spoon tell, I have ransacked my house from garret to cellar, and I bless the Belgians, Servians, and Armenians, the Poles and the French orphans for ridding me of a suffocating mass of things that I didn’t use, and yet felt obliged to keep.

My wardrobe is now the irreducible minimum, the French Relief has the rest, and at last I have more than enough hangers in my closet to support my frocks.  The shoes that pinched but looked so smart that they kept tempting me into one more trial have gone to the Red Cross Shop.  No more concerts will be ruined by them.  The hat that made me look ten years older than I like to think I do, accompanied them.  It was a good hat, almost new, and it cost—­more than I pay for hats nowadays.  I do not need to wear it out.  My large silver tea-pot given me by my maid of honor did good work for the Belgians—­I hope if she ever finds out about its fate that she will be glad that it is now warm stockings for many thin little Belgian legs.  Nora, from Ireland, viewed its departure with satisfaction—­it made one less thing to polish.  Many odds and ends of silver followed, and were put into the melting-pot, being too homely to survive—­I’m saving enough for heirlooms for my grandchildren, of course.  One must not allow sentiment to go by the board; we need it especially now that we have lost such quantities of it out of the world.  So much was “made in Germany,” that old Germany of the fairy tales and Christmas trees which seems to be gone forever.