about it.
When, last week, I heard Mrs. Richard Stafford say she would rather go
to a hospital for a month than do anything on earth, I thought my
chance had come. At the hospital, she said, a person had the right to
be waited on and do nothing, and not think about food or servants, and
not feel they were bothering other people by being sick; and while she
wasn't sick exactly, a hospital would seem like heaven if she could be
in one for a little while. She had laughed when she said it, and
didn't dream of its being taken in earnest, but I took it in earnest,
for the tiredness in her face makes me ache every time I see her, and
right up in my mind popped the little secret Father and I and Miss Polk
could have. What I wrote was this:

_Father dear, will you please send me five hundred dollars, and if you
can do it by return mail I will be very much obliged. The person I
want part of it for is so tired that she might not be able to ever get
rested unless she has a chance pretty quick to lie down and do nothing
for a month, anyhow, and that is why I am in a hurry. Tiredness is a
very wearing disease and if it runs on too long it runs a person into a
state that is almost impossible to get out of, and the whole family has
to pay up for letting it go on. Home gets hell-y when there's too much
tiredness in it. What I want the money for is this: Mrs. Stafford is
worn out. You know her. She was Miss Mary Shirley, and married a
perfectly useless man when she was eighteen, and she is now the mother
of seven children, and has a mother-in-law living with her, and also
Miss Lou Barbee, who won't go away. And, of course, the man whom she
can't turn out. He isn't bad. Just lazy, with nothing to him, but she
loves him and I will skip over that part. She needs a rest and ought
to have it. It's nothing but scrimp and scrape and strive to keep up
appearances day in and day out, year in and year out, until she is all
to pieces and the children don't realize what is the matter. And, of
course, the Male Person doesn't, for he says that Woman's Place is in
the Home. When he told me that yesterday (his heels were on the
railing of his porch, where he generally keeps them, and his pipe in
his mouth) I thought to myself that if he were mine he would have to
get out of my home or prove he had a better right to share it with me
than he had ever proved to his wife. But I won't get on that, either.
I'll go back to Mrs. Stafford._