we girls used to get so excited
about--Art, you know, and Music of course, and people who make these
things their God. The town opens up if you look at it right--and you
find Movements--Politics--you hear people talk--you see suffrage
parades--I marched in one not long ago feeling like Joan of Arc! And
you find men, too, who are doing things. Big schemes for skyscrapers
and homes! I mean that our New York is here!"

Again there came a pause in the writing. Her eyes looked excited. She
smiled and frowned. Now to finish it off!

"What I want of it all I am not yet sure--for me personally, I mean.
But there is my husband, to begin with, and his work that I can help
grow--and his old friends. And they are not all. I keep hearing of new
ones I must meet--and they are mixed in with all those things I have
discovered in the town. A few of these people were born here--but most
have come from all over the country. Sometimes I shut my eyes and
ask--'Where are you now, all over the land, you others who are to come
to New York and be friends of mine and of my children?'

"I want children--more than one. How many I am not quite sure. That's
another point--you decide these things." She frowned and scratched this
sentence out. "And children grow--and the idea of bringing them up
makes me feel very young and humble, too. But in that we are all in the
same boat--for the whole country, I suppose, is a good deal the same.
What a queer and puzzling, gorgeous age we are just beginning--all of
us! I wonder what I shall make of it? What shall I be like ten years
from now? How much shall I mean to my husband--and to other men and
women? But most of all to women--for we are coming together so! I
wonder what we shall make of it all? I wonder how much we women who
march--march on and on to everything--are really going to mean in the
world!

"Oh, how solemn! Good-night, my dears! A kiss to every one of you!"

She folded her letter with the rest, and then she quickly squeezed them
all into a large envelope, which she addressed to Miss Barbara Wells,
Bismarck, North Dakota. Ethel's eyes were very bright. She sniffed a
little and smiled at herself. "Oh, don't be a baby! It's all over now,
you know--I mean it's just beginning!"

She stopped for a moment by the table, with the letter in her hand, and
looked down at Amy's picture. "That is all any one needs to know."

Her look was pitying, tender, but a little curious, too.

"I wonder what yo