g on earth that you and father really
wish!"

{176}

III

CHICAGO, _November fifth_.

PRECIOUS FATHER AND EVELYN:--
I know all my letters thus far have been rather no-account. They
were just to let you know that I was well, and interested, and
getting used to things. I loath the city so that I think I must be a
country mouse. Every time I go down in the Elevated, past all the
grimy, slimy, hideous back buildings, something in me turns over and
revolts. I want to be within reach of red leaves, and wheat-stubble,
and fat quail running in the roadside grass. Did the little red and
yellow chrysanthemums do well this year? How about that marigold
border I planted in the kitchen garden?

However, I am going to have a most instructive winter. It was crude
of me {177} to think it, but because mother's friends are mostly
different kinds of reformers, I expected to find them dubs and
scrubs. It seems droll for people who can't live the normal human
life successfully to set themselves up to say that therefore it's
all wrong, and they will show us a better way to play the game. But
only a few of these are that kind of reformers, and they're not
dubby and scrubby at all! Some of them are just reformers from the
teeth out. They're merely amusing themselves.

Mother is n't playing, however. She's tremendously in earnest. Being
a reformer is n't fattening. She keeps back no pound of flesh. She
is so thin and tense and nervous, so obsessed with her own ideas,
that it worries me some times. I feel as if I lived perpetually in
the room with an electric fan. I have {178} been to her classes
several times. She has a certain eager eloquence, a real appeal,
that will always gain her a hearing. I wish she could keep her
neckties straight, but that is a trifle.

Do you remember old Mrs. Knowles saying that she loved to sit at the
window and "see the people going pro and con in the street?" That is
my present occupation! These people do a tremendous amount of "going
pro and con" in the world of the mind. I have been hearing a vast
deal of feminist discussion, owing to the appearance of some new
books in that line. Can you see why, if nature has spent some
thousands of years making women "anabolic, or conservers of energy,"
they should try to reverse the process in a decade and become even
as men, who are "katabolic, or dispensers of