best for me to wait in France for my mother and father. They are now in Berlin waiting for the powers that be to give some kind of a permit for some kind of a road that Bobby is to build from Constantinople to the interior; that is, he is to build it if he can get the permission of the Imperial Government. What the Germans have to do with Turkey, you can search me, but that is what Bobby writes me. He has done a lot of work on it already in the way of preliminary plans. I am to hang around until I hear from them, so I am going to hang around with the Polly Perkinses.

No doubt Kent is home by this time. I envy him, somehow. It is so wonderful to have a home to go to. Now isn’t that a silly line of talk for Judy Kean to be getting off, I, who have always declared that a Gypsy van was my idea of bliss? I never have had a home and I never[8] have wanted one until lately. I fancy that winter in Paris with your mother in the Rue Brea was my undoing. Of course, if Bobby had been anything but a civil engineer and Mamma had been anything but so much married to Bobby that she had to trot around with him from one end of the earth to the other, why then, I might have had a home. But Bobby is Bobby and he wouldn’t have been himself doing anything but building roads, and I certainly would not have had Mamma let him build them all by his lonesome. The truth of the matter is, I was a mistake. I should either never have been born or I should have been born a boy. Geewhillikins! What a boy I would have been! Somehow, I’m glad I’m not, though.

[8]

I am wild to see little Mildred. It seems so wonderful for you to be a mother. I know you will make a great job of being one, too. Are you going to have her be an old-fashioned baby with the foregone conclusion that she must “eat her peck of dirt,” or is she to be one of these infants whose toys must be sterilized before she is allowed[9] to play with them, and who is too easily contaminated to be kissed unless the kisser gargles first with corrosive sublimate? Please let me know about this, because kiss her I must and will, and if I have to be aseptic before I can do it, I fancy I had better begin right now. Here is Polly with the mail and Paris papers. Will finish later.

[9]

It has come! Actual war! We feel like fools to have rushed off here to the country without knowing more about the state France was in. I can hardly believe it even now. They are asking Americans to leave Paris, but I can’t leave. How can I, with Mamma and Papa in Berlin? I am going to stay right where I am until things 

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