I felt in my trembly bones that it was some sort of summons affair from
Judge Wade; and it was. I looked into the first paragraph and then
decided that I had better get up and dress and have a cup of coffee and
a single egg before I tried to read it.

Incidental to my bath and dressing, I weighed and found that I had lost
all four of those last surplus pounds and two more in three days. Those
two extra pounds might be construed to prove that I was in love, but
exactly with whom I was utterly unprepared to say. I didn't even enjoy
the thinness, but took a kind of already married look in my glass and
tried to slip the egg past my bored lips and get myself to chew it down.
It was work; and then I took up the judge's letter, which also was work
and more of it.

He started at the beginning of everything, that is at the beginning of
the tuberculosis girl, and I cried over the pages of her as if she had
been my own sister. At the tenth page we buried her and took up Alfred,
and I must say I saw a new Alfred in the judge's bouquet-strewn
appreciation of him, but I didn't want him as bad as I had the day
before, when I read his own new and old letters, and cried over his old
photographs. I suppose that was the result of some of what the judge
manages the juries with. He'd be apt to use it on a woman, and she
wouldn't find out about it until it was too late to be anything but mad.
Still when he began on me at page sixteen I felt a little better, though
I didn't know myself any better than I did Alfred when I got to page
twenty.

What I am, is just a poor foolish woman, who has a lot more heart than
she can manage with the amount of brains she got with it at birth.
I'm not any star in a rose-coloured sky, and I don't want to inspire