"When Mother was here, it was bearable. We escaped as often as we
could, and rode and drove and made secret visits to the city and saw
the plays at matinees. There's nothing old about Mother. I suppose
that's why she married again. But now that I'm left alone in this
house of decay, where everybody and everything belongs to the past,
I'm frightened of being so young, and catch looks that make me feel
that I ought to be ashamed of myself. It's so long since I quarreled
with a girl or flirted with a boy that I can't remember it. I'm
forgetting how to laugh. I'm beginning not to care about clothes or
whether I look nice."

"One day is exactly like another. I wander about aimlessly with
nothing to do, nowhere to go, no one to speak to. I've even begun to
give up reading novels, because they make me so jealous. It's all
wrong, Alice. It's bad and unhealthy. It puts mutinous thoughts into
my head. Honestly, the only way in which I can get the sort of
thrill that I ought to have now, if ever I am to thrill at all, is
in making wild plans of escape, so wild and so naughty that I don't
think I'd better write about them, even to you, dear."

"Mother's on her honeymoon. She went away a week ago in a state of
self-conscious happiness that left Grandfather and Grandmother
snappy and disagreeable. She will be away four months, and every
weekly letter that comes from her will make this place more and more
unbearable and me more restless and dangerous. I could get myself
invited away. Enid would have me and give me a wonderful time. She
has four brothers. Fanny has begged me to stay with her in Boston
for the whole of the spring and see and do everything, which would
be absolutely heaven. And you know everybody in New York and could
make life worth living."