excited for fear her dinner will fall overboard. The way she juggles food would get her a job in the vaudeville game any day. She sits up as tho' she'd been impaled, and the shaft broken off in her body.

Long ago—a being, desirous of unhitchment could come here, rent a room, hang her pajamas in the closet and fade away back to Broadway, but times are changed, and you must serve six months or the Judge's wife will not let you have a divorce. The Judge's house is next to mine and the way I look demure when I pass, is a heathenism hypocrisy. But he is under petticoat tyranny and I dread ruffling the petticoat.

Formerly the law was three months, but the Cataract Hotel had the Legislature change it as they could not make enough money.

We had chicken last night and asparagus tips—did you ever notice what a lot of skin a boarding house chicken has? And the tips just missed by one, being tip. The meals are an unsatisfactory substitute for something to eat, and I find myself filling up on bread to keep my stomach and backbone apart.

I am up against old timers that are always to be met at boarding houses—the dear old soldier and the lady "too heavy for light amusements, and not old enough to sit in the corner and knit," as George Ade puts it. She is simply ubiquitous; she is everywhere; she does not gossip! Oh no! Still she wonders if they really are married, you know, and if that strange man is her brother or not? Oh you know the whole tribe! Dear old parasites on the body politic! I have also had sudden paralysis of the jaw from looking into a country mirror and was not again convinced, until consulting my own hand glass during the night that one of my eyes had not slipped down below my nose. I can get along very well if my hair is not parted at all, but I insist upon my features remaining in the same locations.

I am copying down some of the stories that I hear as they are well worth it, and may come in handy some day. I have the advantage of coming upon them suddenly for the first time, with an absolute unbiased mind, which like the Bellman's chart in "The Hunting of the Snark" is "a perfect and absolute blank."

I know I shall go mad before the six months are up, for after ten days, I am down-down deep in a bog of melancholy, and so bored that I feel like the president of the gimlet club.

My stomach like nature abhors a vacuum, so me to the strangled eggs and baked spuds which are our unfailing morning diet.

In the name of Charity, send me messages from the world I love.

Devotedly,
MARIANNE.

Dearest Lorna:

There's an old maid here (Heaven knows she's out of place) who wears her hair in one of those "tied for life knots," and she comes tip-toeing to my room each night to ask me if I think she'll ever get a man. Because I've had one, and am making something that resembles a trousseau, she thinks that I have a recipe for cornering the male market. Her dental arch is like the porte-cochere of the new Belmont Hotel, and last night a precocious four-year-old said, "Miss Mandy, why don't you tuck your teeth in?"—Miss Mandy would if she could but she can't. She is the sort who would stop her own funeral to sew up a hole in her shroud.

The moonlight nights here are a perfect irritation, and I really think this moon isn't half as calloused to demonstration as our dear old New York moon. There are so few men here that the female congregation is getting terribly out of practice.

I have found out lately that our attorneys out here rob us of everything and politely allow us to keep the balance.

My abode of virtue is filled with furniture from the vintage of the early forties and I sit in it alone and am so pathetically good, that I am beginning to suspect myself.

You know I was born when I was very young and have been desperately tidy about my morals ever since, but for fear of stumbling just because I'm so bored I have entrenched myself behind a maddening routine. Six months here ought to put ballast into the brain of the silliest.

I think that marriage has become a social atrophy, and I never want to be guilty of irrevocably skewering two hearts together.

I fear myself only when I'm bored. Eve never would have flirted with the snake if Adam hadn't got on her nerves. I always could resist everything but temptation.

Bern once told me that every married man ought to be made to run after his wife. And I told him he'd be out of breath most of the time if he tied up with me.

I went to church Sunday and the funny man at the head of the table said he was going round to view the ruins in the afternoon. Father Time, who sits opposite me and mows down the food said, "Every stylish woman I see, I know she's getting a divorce and I can't understand it, as most of them are good looking." I answered "You didn't see the other half."

I am not going to correspond with Bern as our mail might be intercepted. For although I'm passing through the mournful ceremony of losing my husband in South Dakota, I don't want to gather too much dust on my skirts on the way to the funeral. We send each other registered letters every day—but that's different—nobody could possibly get those.

There is a woman here who does a queer, pretty sort of embroidery. And she said this morning with unquenchable urbanity, "I will learn you how to do shadow work." Now Bern and I have been busy on all sorts of shadow work for the past four years in New York, but this is a different pattern. Sioux Falls is plethoric of widows and when one is freed, the other convicts writhe under the burden of their stripes. Dearie, won't you drop in and try to quiet my dressmaker? She is beginning to show evidences of dissatisfaction—inscrutable sign-manual of finances at low tide. I'm not rich but I'm sweet and clean—did I hear two dollars and a dish of cherries?

I have bought a calendar with the dates on a block of pages—one page for each day, just for the joy of tearing them off with a vim every twenty-four hours. Sometimes I allow two days to pass, then I do a war dance like a Sioux, wild at the opportunity of pulling off a couple at a time.

There is a N. Y. Central time table on my desk and I am eternally looking up train connections until I feel like a bureau of information. I have enough money to get back on, tucked away in my stocking. And if I have to take in washing I won't touch it. Funds are getting very low so I've started writing short stories again but "like" usual, publishers don't seem to recognize a genius and my P. O. box is always filled with long yellow comebacks—slip enclosed "Sorry we find your valuable Mss. unavailable for our publication, etc." However, nothing beats trying but failure. And although everything on this mud ball looks inky, and I am once more Past Grand Master of Hoodoo Philosophy, I shall grit my teeth and push ahead as I have done a thousand times before. My debts are growing like a snow ball and although I am not entirely broke, I am so badly bent that it ceases to be funny. There isn't a blooded dog here except the ones we Easterners bring. The Sioux Falls dogs are like the people—you can't tell exactly what breed they are, but as a few of the N. Y. lawyers and doctors and a few of the N. Y. dogs have remained here, we hope for a better blending in the next litter.

There is an Englishman here who calls himself