rations as usual.

* * * * *

"When my two (2) months are up here I think I should be quite sorry,"
she wrote in the diary, "except that I'm going to Uncle Peter next,
and him I would lay me down and dee for, only I never get time enough
to see him, and know if he wants me to, when I live with him I shall
know. Well life is very exciting all the time now. Aunt Margaret
brings me up this way. She tells me that she loves me and that I've
got beautiful eyes and hair and am sweet. She tells me that all the
time. She says she wants to love me up enough to last because I never
had love enough before. I like to be loved. Albertina never loves any
one, but on Cape Cod nobody loves anybody--not to say so anyway. If a
man is getting married they say he _likes_ that girl he is going to
marry. In New York they act as different as they eat. The Hutchinsons
act different from anybody. They do not know Aunt Margaret has adoptid
me. Nobody knows I am adoptid but me and my aunts and uncles. Miss
Prentis and Aunt Beulah's mother when she came home and all the
bohemiar ladies and all the ten Hutchinsons think I am a little
visiting girl from the country. It is nobody's business because I am
supported out of allowances and salaries, but it makes me feel queer
sometimes. I feel like

"'Where did you come from, baby dear,
Out of the nowhere unto the here?'

Also I made this up out of home sweet home.

"'Pleasures and palaces where e'er I may roam,
Be it ever so humble I wish I had a home.'

"I like having six homes, but I wish everybody knew it. I am nothing
to be ashamed of. Speaking of homes I asked Aunt Margaret why my aunts
and uncles did not marry each other and make it easier for every one.
She said they were not going to get married. That was why they adoptid
me. 'Am I the same thing as getting married?' I ast. She said no, I
wasn't except that I was a responsibility to keep them unselfish and
real. Aunt Beulah doesn't believe in marriage. She thinks its beneth
her. Aunt Margaret doesn't think she has the health. Aunt Gertrude has
to have a career of sculpture, Uncle David has got to marry some one
his mother says to or not at all, and does not like to marry anyway.
Uncle Jimmie never saw a happy mariage yet and thinks you have a beter
time in single blesedness. Uncle Peter did not sign in the book where
they said they would adopt