't necessary. Oh, how Alice hates that word! She says she
supposes it's never "necessary" to be happy.

Well, Peter heard that when the Paris scheme came up--he'd written home
that he couldn't work without the art atmosphere--Grandmother Evarts
said:

"Why, I'm sure he has the Metropolitan Museum to go to; and there's
Wanamaker's picture-gallery, too. Has he been to Wanamaker's?"

I thought I should throw a fit when Peter told me that!

I know, of course, that the family pity Peter for living in a house
that's all at sixes and sevens, and for not having everything the way he
has been used to having it; and I know they think I keep him from going
to see them all at home, when the truth is--although, as usual, I can't
say it--sometimes I absolutely have to HOUND him to go there; though, of
course, he's awfully fond of them all, and his mother especially; but
he gets dreadfully lazy, and says they're his own people, anyway, and
he can do as he pleases about it. It's their own fault, because they've
always spoiled him. And if they only knew how he hates just that way of
living he's been always used to, with its little, petty cast-iron
rules and regulations, and the stupid family meals, where everybody is
expected to be on time to the minute! My father-in-law pulls out his
chair at the dinner-table exactly as the clock is striking one, and if
any member of the family is a fraction late all the rest are solemn and
strained and nervous until the culprit appears. Peter says the way he
used to suffer--he was NEVER on time.

The menu for each day of the week is as fixed as fate, no matter what
the season of the year: hot roast beef, Sunday; cold roast beef, Monday;
beef-steak, Tuesday; roast mutton, Wednesday; mutton pot-pie, Thursday;
corned beef, Friday; and beef-steak again on Saturday. My father-in-law
never eats fish or poultry, so they only have either if there is
state company. There's one sacred apple pudding that's been made every
Wednesday for nineteen years, and if you can imagine anything more
positively dreadful than that, _I_ can't.

Every time, as soon as we sit down to the table, Grandmother Evarts
always begins, officially:

"Well, Charles Edward, my dear boy, we don't have you here very often
nowadays. I said to your mother yesterday that it was two whole weeks
since you had been to see her. What have you been doing with yourself
lately?"

And when he says, as he always does, "Nothing, grandmother," I k