some of these days and not so scornful and impatient with repeaters and
parasiters and people like that, but just now she says they aren't
worth wasting time on. She can talk you right into seeing her way, and
the first thing you know you are agreeing with her, and she has landed
you before you realized the net was out. Landed outsiders, I mean.
She will never land Mother and Florine. I love to hear her talk,
though I don't think I am going to be a Careering person. I'd like to
be one, but with a dozen children I am afraid there won't be time. I
wouldn't tell old Jess, but I don't think she is going to Career very
long, either. I believe she is in love with the man who taught her
some of the ologies she is so interested in. He is awfully nice, but
not very practical. He is a psychological sociologist or a
sociological psychologist, I don't know which, but it doesn't matter.
If Jess marries him she will run him and the house.




CHAPTER XII

I wonder what made me get on the subject of my sisters when I began
with Billy and the reason I had not written him as often as he has
written me, but that is the way I do everything in life. If I were a
preacher I wouldn't hold my job long, for the thing I started on would
have about as much connection with the thing I ended with as the moon
with milk. Not that that would be unusual, for a good many ministers
have the same failing and skip about just as I do, but my trouble would
be in hopping from one subject to another so fast that the congregation
would be in Jericho one minute and in Jerusalem the next and never know
how it made the jump. As I am never going to be a preacher, I am not