Often he drifts into little anecdotes about grandfather, and lots of things I never heard before about the Huntingdon family and the older town people. Usually the mornings fly by so fast that I'm surprised when the noon whistle blows and it's time to go home. At first I brought my knitting along to pick up at odd moments, such as the times when he gets to reminiscing. Then I got so interested in practising shorthand, that I began taking down his conversations, as much as I could get of them. That old saying of Uncle Darcy's, "All's fish that comes to my net," seems to be a true one. For everything that comes my way seems to help along towards the goal of my ambition. These very tales I am taking down in shorthand, once I am proficient enough to catch more than one word in a sentence, may prove to be very valuable material for future stories.
It isn't turning out to be a very gay summer after all. Babe and Viola are up in the White Mountains, and Judith is tied at home so closely, keeping house and nursing her mother who has been ill all vacation, that I never see her except when I go to the house. George Woodson is a reporter on a Boston paper, and comes home only on Sunday now and then, and Richard seems to have dropped entirely out of my life. He says he is so busy these days that there's never any time to write, except when he's so dead tired he can't spell his own name.
There's so little going on here of interest to him that my letters to him are few and far between. It's strange how absence makes people drift apart. When he was home he was one of the biggest things in my landscape. If he were here now I'd find plenty of time to boat and ride and talk with him, but now it's hard to find a moment for even a short note; that is, when I'm in a mood for writing one. I surely do miss him, though. We've spent so many summers together.
For the few things that happened between my seventeenth birthday and this last day of August, see my "Book of Second Chronicles." Barby was so interested in reading my Harrington Hall record, and so very complimentary, that I have been writing in it this summer, to the neglect of this old blank book. But I'm going to put it in the bottom of my trunk and take it back to school with me.
Babe is back home. She had a chance to investigate the brass balls of that bedstead in the White Mountains. She did it in fear and trembling, for it was in her Aunt Mattie's room, and she was afraid she'd walk in any minute and ask what she was doing. The balls were empty. So she's still wondering where in the Salvation Army those letters can be. We are going back to Washington together next week. To think of our being Seniors! Father is going to be pleased when he gets Mr. Carver's report of me. I never had a vacation fly by so fast.
