ely
the monotony of housework that is making my nerves so bad.

Yesterday morning I was drying the dishes and Dinky-Dunk was washing. I
found the second spoon with egg on it. I don't know why it was, but that
trivial streak of yellow along the edge of a spoon suddenly seemed to
enrage me. It became monumental, an emblem of vague incapabilities which
I would have to face until the end of my days. I flung that spoon back
in the dish-pan. Then I turned on my husband and called out to him, in a
voice that didn't quite seem like my own, "O God, can't you wash 'em
_clean_? Can't you wash 'em clean?" I even think I ran up and down the
room and pretty well made what Percival Benson would call "a bally ass"
of myself. Dinky-Dunk didn't even answer me. But he dried his hands and
got his things and went outdoors, to the stables, I suppose. His face
was as colorless as it could possibly get. I felt sorry; but it was too
late. And my sniffling didn't do any good. And it startled me, as I sat
thinking things over, to realize that I'd lost my sense of humor.

_Thursday the Fourth_

Dinky-Dunk thinks I'm mad. I'm quite sure he does. He came in at noon
to-day and found me on the floor with the kitten. I'd tied a piece of fur
to the end of a string. Oh, how that kitten scrambled after that fur,
round and round in a circle until he'd tumble over on his own ears! I
was squeaking and weak with laughing when Dinky-Dunk stood in the door.
Poor boy, he takes things so solemnly! But I know he thinks I'm quite
mad. Perhaps I am. I cried myself to sleep last night. And for several
days now I've had a longing for _caviare_.

_Wednesday the Seventeenth_

Spring is surely coming. It promises to be an early one. I feel better
at the thought of it, and of getting out again. But the roads are quite
impassable. Such mud! Such oceans of glue-pot dirt! They have a saying
out here that soil is as rich as it is sticky. If this is true
Dinky-Dunk has a second Garden of Eden. This mud sticks to everything,
to feet, to clothes, to wagon-wheels. But there's getting to be real
warmth in the sun that shines through my window.

_Saturday the Twenty-seventh_

A warm Chinook has licked up the last of the snow. Even Dinky-Dunk
admits that spring is coming. For three solid hours an awakened
blue-bottle has been buzzing against the pane of my bedroom window. I
wonder if most of us aren't like that fly, mystified by the illusion of
light