was in it, anyhow, in society I mean, so she took a header and plunged
all right. She says she has a scientific and analytical mind and she
worked it all out--the number of hours and days and weeks and months
she had spent flopping around from one party to another, and doing the
things she was supposed to do, and saying the things she wasn't
supposed to say, and then she estimated the cost in time and strength
and money and wear and tear on her character, and announced that it
wasn't a paying business, and at the end of the year she was going to
get out. The year won't be up until October and that is why she is
with Mother and Florine this summer.

What she is going in for when it is up I don't believe she knows
herself, yet. She says woman to-day is in the most unsettled and
uncertain state that any animal has ever been in since the first one, a
mollusk, or something without a backbone started to get one. And that
it will take time for woman to evolute into being the best kind of a
human being she is capable of becoming, and that the next step in the
evoluting is to get out of her head some of the foolishness put in it
by men people who didn't know what they were talking about. Mother
thinks it fearful in her to talk as she does, and can't understand how
she can be so daring and so indelicate as to speak about coming from
mollusks and things which don't have spinal columns and nervous
systems, but Jessica says that is because Mother belongs to a day that
didn't know about such things, and that the modern woman is shedding
the shucks which have kept her a caterpillar much longer than was
necessary. A good many old ideas she thinks are shucks--that is, she
pretends to; but she is an old dear just the same, if she does say
things about people which it isn't polite to say.

I love old Jess. She isn't but twenty-two, and she will be less sniffy