Then, of course, there's the life I want for my literary career, and one in which to be just a plain wife and mother. One thing is certain, if I ever have a daughter I'll try to remember how a girl feels at my age; although I don't see how one who has been one can ever forget. And there are some things she shall be allowed to decide for herself. R. B. (As long as I was a mere child Barby seemed to understand me perfectly. But now that I lack only one paltry inch of being as tall as she is, she doesn't seem able to get my point of view at all. She doesn't seem to realize that I've put away childish things, and that when you're in your teens you're done with doll-rags.) There is nothing so bitter in life as being misunderstood. If you have cruel step-parents who mistreat you out of pure meanness, everybody sympathizes with you. But if you have devoted[30] own parents who hurt you through a mistaken idea that they're doing it for your own good, nobody sympathizes with you. I'd rather be beaten or locked in my room on bread and water than have Minnie Waite or Daisy Poole tagging after me forevermore. [30] I wasn't at home the day Mrs. Saxe came around, organizing the "Busy Bees" to do Red Cross work for the Belgians. But Barby put my name down and paid the fifty cents dues, and said I'd be glad to do my part. Well, I am glad, but I'd already been trying to do it ever since the war started "over there." I've rolled bandages every Saturday afternoon and taken part in two plays and waited on the table at all the lawn fetes, and I'm knitting my sixth sweater for French and Belgian orphans. But I draw the line at being a "Busy Bee," and meeting around with a lot of little girls not one of them over thirteen and most of them younger. And Minnie Waite has a crush on me anyhow, and is harder to get rid of than a plague of sand-fleas. I could have cried when Barby told me what she had let me in for, and I couldn't help sounding cross when I said she might at least have consulted me first. It was too much to have that miserable bunch of kids wished on to me. But Barby only reminded me that I was using[31] slang, and said cheerfully, "Did it ever occur to you, Baby Mine, that you are three whole years younger than Laura Nelson, and yet you want to be with her every moment? Possibly she may feel that you are tagging." [31] Laura is one of the summer girls, and Barby never has approved
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