"Uncle sitting on the ramparts with Miss Clara Emily"
(NEXT DAY)
St. Malo.
Dearest Mama: Edna has sent me the letter about your coming over, and I am so relieved. Perhaps you will get here in time to save Uncle from Miss Clara Emily; I do hope so. Edna's things must be lovely, and I read her letter to Lee. He says if I'm good I will have some things of my own some day, and I do hope so; but Uncle is so heavy on my mind that I cannot realize that I shall ever have any life except trying to keep him from Miss Clara Emily. Mr. Peters is no good at all any more, and has a bad cold besides. He and Clara sit on the ramparts and gaze at the sea, and look as if they were two consolation prizes that the people who won didn't care enough about to take home with them. Lee says he never realized that Mr. Peters could peter out quite so completely. Lee wants to go yachting, and wants me to go, too, and I can't leave Uncle, and Uncle won't leave Miss Clara Emily. It's quite stupid here at St. Malo, and we want to go on; but Lee won't go on, and I'd rather stay in a stupid place with Lee than go anywhere without him. He's mad over the Kingsleys tagging along, because he likes Scott McCarthy less and less all the time. Scott walks on the other side of me sometimes, and Lee doesn't like it. I think land is getting on Lee's nerves, and he ought to go yachting; but life is such a tangle just now that I don't know what to do about anything. Miss Clara Emily is hemstitching a handkerchief, and I just know that it is for Uncle. Oh, dear.
(NEXT DAY)
St. Malo.
Dearest Mama: Such an awful thing almost happened! Clara had a nightmare, and came near choking to death on Mr. Brewer's plaster—the locket, you know. Uncle says only a prompt, efficient, quick-witted, thoroughly capable nature like Miss Clara Emily's could have saved her. Oh, I just know he's becoming serious, and Lee says it's just tommy-rot about the efficiency, because all in the world that Miss Clara Emily did was to jerk the locket up by the chain; and she did that in such an awfully quick way that poor Clara says she's cured of Mr. Brewer forever. She will have to eat soup through a china straw for several days.
Uncle wants to go to Carnac and see the ruins of the Stone Age, and he and Miss Clara Emily are mapping out a trip. I'm sure I don't know what I'll do, for Scott McCarthy has bet Mr. Stowell ten dollars that Uncle gets "hooked" in Carnac. Lee told me, and Lee himself is provisioning the yacht, and says he's cock-sure that he eats some of those provisions aboard of her himself. Emily doesn't want to go to Carnac, and Jim Freeman says it isn't any automobile country, on account of the relics of the Stone Age being so thick in the roads.