"Cursed be he who prints this part
From the inmost sanctum of my heart."
Up to this time there has been little in my life important enough to put into a record, so it is just as well that I waited. But now that this awful war is going on over in Europe, all sorts of thrilling things may begin to happen to us any minute. Father says there's no telling how soon our country may be fighting, too. He thinks it's shameful we haven't been doing our part all along. As he is a naval surgeon and has been in the service so many years, he will be among the first to be drawn into the thick of danger and adventure.
I am old enough now to understand what that will mean to us all, for I am fifteen years and eleven months, and could easily pass for much older if Barby would only let me put my hair up. Barby is the dearest mother that ever lived, and I wouldn't for worlds appear to be criticizing her, but she is a bit old-fashioned in some of her ideas about bringing up children. I believe she and Tippy would like to keep me the rest of my mortal life, "standing with reluctant feet where the brook and river meet," regardless of the fact that I am all ready to wade in and fully able to do so.
I asked Tippy why nobody ever quotes that verse farther along in the poem, which exactly expresses my sentiments:
"Then why pause with indecision,
When bright angels in thy vision
Beckon thee to fields Elysian?"
It stumped her to think of an answer for a moment, and she made an excuse of putting the cat out, in order to give herself more time. But when she came back all she had found to say was that I needn't think being grown up was any field Elysian. I was eating my white bread now, and if a girl only knew all that lay ahead of her she'd let well enough alone. She'd wait for trouble to come to her instead of running to meet it.
Somehow I don't believe Tippy ever had any bright angels beckoning her, else she couldn't be so pessimistic about my growing up. I can't think of her as ever being anything but an elderly widow with her hair twisted into a peanut on the back of her head. And yet she had a lover once, and a wedding day, or she couldn't be Mrs. Maria Triplett now. But it's impossible to think of her as being gay fifteen and dancing down the stairs to meet the morning with a song. One feels that she met it with a broom, saying:
"Shall birds and bees and ants be wise
While I my moments waste?
O let me with the morning rise
And to my duties haste."
She's said that to me probably as much as five hundred times. I shall bracket this part about her just as soon as I can get a bottle of red ink. But how I'm going to account to her for having red ink in my possession is more than I know.
That's the worst about being the only child in a family. They're all so fond of you and so interested in your sayings and doings, that they watch every movement of your mind and body. You're like a clock in a glass case with your works open to the gaze of the older people. It's all very well during the first years for them to keep tab on your development, but the trouble is most relatives never seem to know when you're developed, and have reached the point where a little privacy is your right. It's maddening to have to give a reason every time you turn around.