a bulky letter and read it through.
It was the "round-robin" come again on its annual journey over the land.
It had been in a lonely mining camp, on a cattle ranch, in a mill town
and in cities large and small. There were many kinds of handwriting
here, and widely different stories of the growth, the swift unfolding,
of the lives of a new generation of women. "Girls like me." She read it
through.

Then she took up her pen and began to write swiftly:

"I have been here for over three years--but it was hard to write before,
because everything was far from clear." She stopped and frowned. "How
much shall I tell them?" An eagerness to be frank and tell all was
mingled with that feeling of Anglo-Saxon reticence which had been bred
in Ethel's soul back in the town in Ohio. "Besides, I haven't time,"
she thought.

"I feel," she wrote, "as though I were just out of danger--barely out.
In danger, I mean, of nervously dashing about after nothing until I got
wrinkled and old at forty--nerves in shreds. I might have done that. I
have met a nerve specialist lately--and the stories he has told me about
women in this town!

"However! I want to make myself clear. Am I a high-brow? Not at all.
I want good clothes--I love to shop--and I propose to go on shopping.
If you do not, let me tell you, my dears, that the men in New York are
like all the rest--and you would soon be leading a very lonely
existence! And I don't want that, I want bushels of friends--and some
of them men--decidedly! I want to dance and dine about--but I don't
want to be religious about it! Nor frantic and get myself into a state!

"Well, but I did start out like that. When I came here to live--" She
hesitated. "No, I'd better scratch that out."

"Thank Heaven I got married," she wrote, "and fell in love with my
husband." Again she stopped with a quick frown. "And I had a baby. And
I began to find something real." Another pause, a long one.

"I had quite a struggle after that. I was all hemmed in--" she stopped
again--"by the city I found when I first arrived. But I huffed and I
puffed and I hunted about--and at last I discovered our New York--the
town we girls used to dream about at home in all those talks we had!
Oh, I don't mean I have found it yet--but I've felt it, though, and had
one good look. I dined with some people. How silly that sounds. But
never mind--the point is not me, but the fact that this city is really
and truly crammed full of the things