But we didn't stay at the play. It started out all right, but pretty
soon a man and a woman on the stage began to quarrel. They were
married (not really, but in the play, I mean), and I guess it was some
more of that incompatibility stuff. Anyhow, as they began to talk
more and more, Mother began to fidget, and pretty soon I saw she was
gathering up our things; and the minute the curtain went down after
the first act, she says:

"Come, dear, we're going home. It--it isn't very warm here."

As if I didn't know what she was really leaving for! Do old folks
honestly think they are fooling us all the time, I wonder? But even if
I hadn't known then, I'd have known it later, for that evening I heard
Mother and Aunt Hattie talking in the library.

No, I didn't listen. I _heard_. And that's a very different matter.
You listen when you mean to, and that's sneaking. You hear when you
can't help yourself, and that you can't be blamed for. Sometimes it's
your good luck, and sometimes it's your bad luck--just according to
what you hear!

Well, I was in the window-seat in the library reading when Mother and
Aunt Hattie came in; and Mother was saying:

"Of course I came out! Do you suppose I'd have had that child see that
play, after I realized what it was? As if she hasn't had enough of
such wretched stuff already in her short life! Oh, Hattie, Hattie, I
want that child to laugh, to sing, to fairly tingle with the joy of
living every minute that she is with me. I know so well what she _has_
had, and what she will have--in that--tomb. You know in six months she