friends together, and since Mary married Bartram and moved to Woodridge
we've exchanged many little visits, for our husbands agree, and now
that she has time she is becoming an enthusiastic gardener, after my own
heart, having last season become convinced of the ugliness of cannas and
coleus beds about a restored colonial farmhouse. Why might they not join
us on our driving trips, by way of their vacation?

Immediately I started to telephone the invitation, and then paused. I
will write instead. Mary Penrose is on the long-distance line,--toll
thirty cents in the daytime! In spring I am very stingy; thirty cents
means six papers of flower seeds, or three heliotropes. Whereas in
winter it is simply thirty cents, and it must be a very vapid
conversation indeed that is not worth so much on a dark winter day of
the quality when neither driving nor walking is pleasant, and if you get
sufficiently close to the window to see to read, you develop a stiff
neck. Also, the difficulty is that thirty cents is only the beginning of
a conversation betwixt Mary Penrose and myself, for whoever begins it
usually has to pay for overtime, which provokes quarterly discussion. Is
it not strange that very generous men often have such serious objections
to the long-distance tails to their telephone bills, and insist upon
investigating them with vigour, when they pay a speculator an extra
dollar for a theatre ticket without a murmur? They must remember that
telephones, whatever may be said to the contrary, are one of the modern
aids to domesticity and preventives of gadding, while still keeping one
not only in touch with a friend but within range of the voice. Surely
there can be no woman so self-sufficient that she does not in silent
moments yearn for a spoken word with one of her kind.

When I had finished sowing my first planting of mignonette and growled
at the prospective labour entailed by thinning out the fall-sown Shirley