CHAPTER VIII

It's over--Father's visit is. He has been gone a week, and it will be
a whole month before he can come again. He has to divide up between
Mother and the girls and me, and he can only get away once in two
weeks, because his partner is ill and business has something the matter
with it and has to be watched, which is why he could stay only four
days in Twickenham Town. I don't see why fathers have to work so hard,
and why wives and daughters must have so many unnecessary things, and
such big houses and so many new clothes and automobiles and parties and
pleasures, which aren't real fun after you have them. But most women
seem to want them, and keep on scrambling for what other people
scramble for, and only a few have sense enough to see how foolish it
all is and stop. Maybe they are wound up so tight they can't stop. I
don't know. I only know I do not want to live the life a lot of women
I know live, and I am not going to do it.

I wish Father could see it the way I do--about working so hard, I
mean--and I think he might, for he says I am a chip off the block and
he is the block, and in almost everything we feel alike; but there's
Mother and the girls, who care for things I don't care for, and of
course they must have them. He gives them everything they want, but he
looked so awfully tired the day he came I could think of nothing else
the night he left, which is why I cried so under the sheet, and then
when the tears were out and I felt lighter I got up and wrote him a
long letter and told him I loved him so it hurt, and that he was the
best and dearest father on all this big, big earth, and if he would let
me come and keep house for him I would fly back. But he wouldn't let