"Humph,” she sniffed. “I
thought so.”
Whereupon I went to the desk
immediately and wrote a long, chatty
letter, in which none of the bile and
venom which filled my system was
permitted to appear. For I knew
perfectly well theft what Mrs. Pil
grim (really meant was that I was
relapsing into a state of sloppiness
that seems to come more or less
natural to me. She was not inter
ested in my correspondence with my
mother at all.
Fact la, my letters 19 mother are
symptoms of the mental oh moral
state In which I may happen to be.
If I am bright and peppy and pros
peroas and generally hitting on all
eight, I write twice a week. It is
no trouble at all, I find. The letters
are good. too. Some of them are
.7orth printing in the little paper
bark home. When I begin to slip
back, as one will do from time to
time, so that I try to fight off shav
ing in the morning, and am apt to
fudge a little on the cold bath and
scream like a tiger at the thought
of putting on the dinner jacket and
going out for a pleasant, horrible
evening with strangers,' my letters
to mother drop off in quality and
number. They are the first of the
more or less irksome tasks to go,
truth to tell. One should not say
that writing to one's mother is irk
some, I know. Nevertheless, it
sometimes is.
‘'When did you write last to your
mother?”
When these wohls fall from Mrs.
