“We must go now, though I leave so much which is only begun and to which I wish to give my constant personal attention. But the mental strain this year has been great. I could not live through another like it. We both want to get far away from our responsibilities and possessions for a while. I want to gain perspective, to have time for quiet thought and study.
“This was my plan from the first, as you know, and now it is imperative. It is impossible for Ralph to write his book with the cares and distractions which we are constantly having.”
“His book?” I asked; “I had not heard of that. Pray what is it about?”
“It is to treat of the colored races in our country. He has been gathering the material for a long time, and it will be an exhaustive work,” she answered. Then she added, “I, too, have a little book planned, but of a very different sort.”
“What! you, Mildred, an authoress!” I cried. “Shall you really write a book?”
“Oh, that is nothing nowadays, when authors are as plenty as cooks and the world is flooded with literary rubbish,” answered Mildred rather disdainfully. “Any scribbler can write a book. It takes neither wit nor wisdom for that.”
“Of course; but you are not a scribbler, and you won’t write rubbish,” I retorted: “But tell me, what is it to be about? will it be a story?”
“No,” she answered. “The public does not need any more stories, at least mediocre ones, and mine could never be anything else. I trust that I have too much self-respect left to be guilty of inflicting another purposeless book on the world’s already overstocked supply. Besides, you know, Howells says all the stories have been told.”
“Then what is it?” I asked. “Is it sermons? or sonnets? or”—
“No,” interposed Mildred; “it is Suggestions,—suggestions to the idle and thoughtless, the rich and the unconsciously selfish. I am confident that there are some tens of thousands of people in this country who are tolerably well-meaning, who have a superfluity of leisure and wealth and strength which they are letting run to waste because no one has suggested to them what they might do.