don’t mind it a bit—only the paper. 

 There comes John’s sister. Such a dear girl as she is, and so careful of me! I must not let her find me writing. 

 She is a perfect, and enthusiastic housekeeper, and hopes for no better profession. I verily believe she thinks it is the writing which made me sick! 

 But I can write when she is out, and see her a long way off from these windows. 

 There is one that commands the road, a lovely, shaded, winding road, and one that just looks off over the country. A lovely country, too, full of great elms and velvet meadows. 

 This wallpaper has a kind of sub-pattern in a different shade, a particularly irritating one, for you can only see it in certain lights, and not clearly then. 

 But in the places where it isn’t faded, and where the sun is just so, I can see a strange, provoking, formless sort of figure, that seems to sulk about behind that silly and conspicuous front design. 

 There’s sister on the stairs! 

 Well, the Fourth of July is over! The people are gone and I am tired out. John thought it might do me good to see a little company, so we just had mother and Nellie and the children down for a week. 

 Of course I didn’t do a thing. Jennie sees to everything now. 

 But it tired me all the same. 

 John says if I don’t pick up faster he shall send me to Weir Mitchell in the fall. 

 But I don’t want to go there at all. I had a friend who was in his hands once, and she says he is just like John and my brother, only more so! 

 Besides, it is such an undertaking to go so far. 

 I don’t feel as if it was worth while to turn my hand over for anything, and I’m getting dreadfully fretful and querulous. 

 I cry at nothing, and cry most of the time. 

 Of course I don’t when John is here, or anybody else, but when I am alone. 

 And I am alone a good deal just now. John is kept in town very often by serious cases, and Jennie is good and lets me alone when I want her to. 

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