Of course we both realize that we're not LIVING
here in this hole, we're simply existing, and nothing matters very much
until we get out of it. In six months, when Charles Edward is
twenty-five, there's a little money coming to him--three thousand
dollars--and then we're going to Paris to live our own lives; but
nobody knows anything about that. One day I said something, without
thinking, to my mother-in-law about that money; I've forgotten what it
was, but she looked so horrified and actually gasped:
"You wouldn't think of Charles Edward's using his PRINCIPAL, Lorraine?"
And I said: "Why not? It's his own principal."
Well, I just made up my mind afterward that I'd never open my mouth
again, while I live here, about ANYTHING I was interested in, even
about Peter!
His father might have let him go to Paris that year before we met, when
he was in New York at the Art League, just as well as not, but the
family all consulted about it, Peter says, and concluded it wasn't
"necessary." That is the blight that is always put on everything we
want to do--it isn't necessary. Oh, how Alice hates that word! She says
she supposes it's never "necessary" to be happy.
Well, Peter heard that when the Paris scheme came up--he'd written home
that he couldn't work without the art atmosphere--Grandmother Evarts
said:
"Why, I'm sure he has the Metropolitan Museum to go to; and there's
Wanamaker's picture-gallery, too.
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