ad to
bear. I liked her most, I'm sure, because it was such a comfortable
ride.

A few billions spent around the house can make things quite
comfortable.

She had need of her billions to carry out her hobbies, or, as she
called it, her "life's work." Aunt Mattie always spoke in cliches
because people could understand what you meant. One of these hobbies
was her collection of flora of the universe. It was begun by her
maternal grandfather, one of the wealthier Plots, and increased as the
family fortunes were increased by her father, one of the more ruthless
Tombs, but it was under Aunt Mattie's supervision that it came, so to
speak, into full flower.

"Love," she would say, "means more to a flower than all the
scientific knowledge in the world." Apparently she felt that the small
army of gardeners, each a graduate specialist in duplicating the right
planetary conditions, hardly mattered.

The collection covered some two hundred acres in our grounds at the
west side of the house. Small, perhaps, as some of the more vulgar
displays by others go, but very, very choice.

The other hobby, which she combines with the first, is equally
expensive. She and her club members, the Daughters of Terra (D.T.s for
short), often find it necessary to take junkets on the family space
yacht out to some distant planet--to straighten out reprehensible
conditions which have come to her attention. I usually went along to
take care of--symbolically, at least--the bags and (their) baggage.

My psychiatrist would say that expressing it in this way shows I have
never outgrown my juvenile attitudes. He says I am simply a case of
arrested development, mental, caused through too much over-shadowing
by the rest of the family. He says that, like the rest of them, I have
inherited the family compulsion to make the universe over to my own
liking so I can pass it on to posterity with a clear conscience, and
my negative attitude toward this is simply a defense mechanism because
I haven't had a chance to do it. He says I really hate my aunt's flora
collection because I see it as a rival for her affection. I tell him
if I have any resentments toward it at all it is for the long hours
spent in getting the latinized names of things drilled into me. I ask
him why gardeners always insist on forcing long meaningless names upon
non-gardeners who simply don't care. He ignores that, and says that
subconsciously I hate my Aunt Mattie because I secretly recogni