-tea and mutton-broth.
{185} Mother needs them badly. Then I discovered that eggs have
always disagreed with her, but she went right on eating them because
she thought them an "ideal food," and that if her stomach was n't
sufficiently standardized to appreciate them, it ought to be! I call
that heroic, if it is droll. Idiosyncrasy is something for which
mother's creed makes no allowance. We now have an attractive set of
eggless breakfasts.--Does all this sound like a model house keeper
writing to a domestic journal? Evelyn knows I have a little right to
throw bouquets at myself, for I was n't born a housekeeper--but
housekeepers _can_ be made!

Seems to me, if you ought to standardize an individual's diet, as
mother thinks, similar arguments apply to his clothes, his features,
his body, his mind, his soul. There's no logical place to {186}
stop. Yet we know that diversity, not similarity, is the end nature
is always seeking in evolution. Of course, if you are going to buck
all the natural laws, that's different!

My country brain gets tired in such a menagerie of ideas. In our own
life at home, there is comfort, peace, sufficient stimulus,
development; this life is exciting, but barren of something that I
will call soil to grow in, because I don't know any better word. Of
course it is great fun for me to come in contact with so many
different kinds of minds and hear them emit their theories. Only,
somehow, the theorists lack reality to me. Do I make myself clear?

I hope this will give you a notion of what I'm doing and thinking,
and that you'll know I'm really having a beautiful time. I miss you
both {187} horribly, though. I will tell about some of the people in
my next letter. I'm acting as mother's secretary just now. She
really needs one, and it's interesting work.

Ever and always,
Your loving child,
MARVEL.

IV

It was eleven o'clock on a mid-April morning--she never in after-life
forgot the day or the hour--that Clarissa Charleroy saw to the depths
of her daughter's mind.

Clarissa awoke that morning with a severe neuralgia. She had given two
parlor-talks the day before, and was now paying the penalty of
overexertion. To lie flat was sickening, yet to rise was impossible.

Marvel promptly took the case in {188} hand. The pillows were piled
high; one hot-water bag was slipped under that aching spot at the