and see what progress you have made since then,
and will help you to recall incidents you would otherwise forget. A
journal fixes things in your mind, and I know you will enjoy it,
especially as no one is to see it, and you can talk to it freely as to a
friend."

That is what Guy said, and I wrote it right down to copy into the book
as a kind of preface or introduction. I am not much pleased with having
to keep a journal, and maybe I shall have Zillah keep it for me. I don't
care to fix things in my mind. I don't like things fixed, anyway. I'd
rather they would be round loose, as they surely would, if I had not
Zillah to pick them up. She is a treasure, and it is almost worth being
married to have a waiting maid--and that reminds me that I may as well
begin back at the time when I was not married, and did not want to be,
if only we had not been so poor, and obliged to make so many shifts to
seem richer than we were.

My maiden name was Margaret McDonald, and I am seventeen next New Year's
Day. My father is of Scotch descent, and a lawyer; my mother was a
Barnard, from New Orleans, and has the best blood of the two. I am an
only child, and very handsome--so everybody says--and I should know it
if they did not say it, for can't I see myself in the glass! And still I
really do not care so much for my good looks except as they serve to
attain the end for which father says I was born.

Almost the first thing I can remember is of his telling me that I must
marry young and marry rich, and I promised him I would, and asked if I
could stay at home with mother just the same after I was married.
Another thing I remember, which made a lasting impression, and that is
the beating father gave me for asking before some grand people staying
at our house, "Why we did not always have beefsteak and hot muffins for
breakfast, instead of just baked potatoes and bread and butter."

I must learn to keep my mouth shut, father said, and not tell all I
knew; and I profited by the lesson, and that is one reason, I suppose,
why I so rarely say what I think, or express an opinion whether
favorable or otherwise.

I do not believe I am deceitful, though all my life I have seen my
parents try to seem what they are not; that is, try to seem like rich
people, when sometimes father's practice brought him only a few hundreds
a year, and there was mother and myself and Tom to support. Tom is my
cousin--Tom McDonald--who lived with us and fell in love