"I'm sending a small birthday token to the boys--a little printing-press.
Richard showed no small skill in setting the letters of my rubber stamp.
It is some days late, but that will separate it from the glut of the
Christmas market. Ask Evan to notify me if he and Barbara go to town.
"Gratefully,
"M. C."
IV
WHEN BARBARA GOES TO TOWN
_March_ 4. I like to go to a plain people's play, where the spectators
groan and hiss the villain. It is a wholesome sort of clearing house
where one may be freed from pent-up emotion under cover of other people's
tears and smiles; the smiles triumphing at the end, which always winds up
with a sudden recoil, leaving the nerves in a healthy thrill. I believe
that I can only comprehend the primal emotions and what is called in
intellectual jargon mental dissipation, and the problem play, in its many
phases, appeals to me even less than crude physical dissipation.
We have seen a drama of the people played quite recently, having been to
New York to spend part of a "midwinter" week's vacation, which father
insisted that Evan should take between two rather complex and
eye-straining pieces of work. Speaking by the almanac, it wasn't
midwinter at all, but pre-spring, which, in spite of lengthening _days_,
is the only uncompromisingly disagreeable season in the country--the time
when measles usually invades the village school, the dogs come slinking
in guiltily to the fire, pasted with frozen mud, the boys have snuffle
colds, in spite of father's precautions, and I grow desperate and flout
the jonquils in my window garden, it seems so very long since summer, and
longer yet to real budding spring.
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