ing fat. I have
put on two pounds in three months. I weigh 118 now, which is a lot for
me, and if I keep on like this I will look like Taft one of these days.

I am coming down to see you next week, and I have got something for you.
Oh, Kate, I am fond of you and I get just crazy to see you.

Yours,
_Nan_.

XIII

_Dear Kate_:

I have been working again. Mrs. Smith got at me about the dancing, not
that she thinks the dancing is bad, but she don't like the places where
I dance nor the people I have to be with, and she is dead sore at the
rooming house where I live. She don't like the girls I float around
with, and that hang around my room. I can't understand it, because they
are all right, and I have known them kind of girls all my life. She came
up to see me one afternoon, and there was half a dozen in the room, and
the smoke was so thick you could cut it with a knife, and she cried
after they left, and said a lot of rot about me being too good to throw
my life away with them sort of people. She talked and she talked to me,
and I thought I would try to work again, not but what dancing ain't
work and there ain't nothing wrong with it either, but there is a hard
crowd down at Kelley's, and sometimes it kinda makes me sick. She talked
to me a lot about Billy, and said it will make a great difference in his
life if he can look back to his folks as being respectable. I myself
don't see why he should be any prouder of his aunt being a servant than
he would be if she was a dancing girl, and I get thirty per for dancing,
and only six little bucks for housework. I stayed awake two nights
thinking about it, wondering if I was getting tough and didn't know it,
cause things that I don't think nothing about at all, Mrs. Smith thinks
awful, and she says that the longer you live in that kind of life and
with people who have no "ideals"--whatever them is, one is just bound to
go down. I don't want to go down, and I don't want to get so I will
think crookedness is right, and that decent people are wrong, so I just
piped it out to myself as I lay awake at night that I would give the
honest work job another chance.

I answered an "ad" in the paper. I got a place up on West End Avenue. I
stayed there two months, then I had bad luck again. I liked the place
real well, and the people liked me, and I suppose I would have been
there yet, if I hadn't of cut my hand, because, take it from me, Kate I
am a dandy housekeeper and