how nitrate is shipped in bags of one hundred kilos, and the
price includes the bags, but the weight is taken on the nitrate only,
involving a deduction from the gross weight of seven-tenths per cent.
Then he ambles off into a long discussion of how the fixation method
from the air may eventually threaten the stability of our entire
amalgamated mines, but probably not during his life-time or even my
own. And I had to read the letter over for the third time before I
winnowed from it the obscure but essential kernel that my shares from
this year forward should bring me in an annual dividend of at least
two thousand, but more probably three, and possibly even four, once
the transportation situation is normalized, but depending largely, of
course, on the labor conditions obtaining in Latin America--and much
more along the same lines.

That news of my long-forgotten and long-neglected nest-egg should have
made me happy. But it didn't. I couldn't quite react to it. As usual,
I thought of the children first, and from their standpoint it did
bring a sort of relief. It was consoling, of course, to know that,
whatever happened, they could have woolens on their little tummies and
shoe-leather on their little piggies. But the news didn't come with
sufficient force to shock the dull gray emptiness out of existence.
I've even been wondering if there's any news that could. For the one
thing that seems always to face me is the absence of intensity from
life. Can it be, I found myself asking to-day, that it's youth, golden
youth, that is slipping away from me?

It startled me a little, to have to face that question. But I shake my
fist in the teeth of Time. I refuse to surrender. I shall not allow
myself to become antiquated. I'm on the wrong track, in some way, but
before I dry up into a winter apple I'm going to find out where the
trouble is, and correct it. I never was much of a sleep-walker. I want
life, Life--and oodles of it....

Among other things, by the way, which I've been missing are books.
They at least are to be had for the buying, and I've decided there's
no excuse for letting the channels of my mind get moss-grown. I've had
a "serious but not fatal wound," as the newspapers say, to my personal
vanity, but there's no use in letting go of things, at my time of
life. Pee-Wee, I'm sure, will never be satisfied with an empty-headed
old frump for a mother, and Dinkie is already asking questions that
are slightly disturbing.