ing business, and at the end of the year she was going to
get out. The year won't be up until October and that is why she is
with Mother and Florine this summer.

What she is going in for when it is up I don't believe she knows
herself, yet. She says woman to-day is in the most unsettled and
uncertain state that any animal has ever been in since the first one, a
mollusk, or something without a backbone started to get one. And that
it will take time for woman to evolute into being the best kind of a
human being she is capable of becoming, and that the next step in the
evoluting is to get out of her head some of the foolishness put in it
by men people who didn't know what they were talking about. Mother
thinks it fearful in her to talk as she does, and can't understand how
she can be so daring and so indelicate as to speak about coming from
mollusks and things which don't have spinal columns and nervous
systems, but Jessica says that is because Mother belongs to a day that
didn't know about such things, and that the modern woman is shedding
the shucks which have kept her a caterpillar much longer than was
necessary. A good many old ideas she thinks are shucks--that is, she
pretends to; but she is an old dear just the same, if she does say
things about people which it isn't polite to say.

I love old Jess. She isn't but twenty-two, and she will be less sniffy
some of these days and not so scornful and impatient with repeaters and
parasiters and people like that, but just now she says they aren't
worth wasting time on. She can talk you right into seeing her way, and
the first thing you know you are agreeing with her, and she has landed
you before you realized the net was out. Landed outsiders, I mean.
She will never land Mother and Florine. I love to hear her talk,
though I don't think I am going to be a Careering person. I'd like to
be one, but with a dozen children I am afraid there won't be time. I
wouldn't tell old Jess, but I don't think she is going to Career very
long, either. I believe she is in love with the man who taught her
some of the ologies she is so interested in. He is awfully nice, but
not very practical. He is a psychological sociologist or a
sociological psychologist, I don't know which, but it doesn't matter.
If Jess marries him she will run him and the house.

CHAPTER XII

I wonder what made me get on the subject of my sisters when I began
with Billy and the reason I had not wri