Ursula Trent

ve simply bolted from home, from what is called a good home (so called I suspect, because a good home is an ideal and therefore doesn't exist), I come to believe that the young should at a certain time be separated from the old and placed in severely classified internment camps. After all, home is an internment camp; all one can do seems to be to make another camp, with oneself as commandant. But the prisoners worry one. I think I was rather a worry to mamma. Before the war I was a worry because I had to be amused and, if possible, married. I had to be provided with horses, which mamma always felt weren't reliable. I had to have frocks ordered for me, which meant going to town with mamma, who hates railway journeys; I had to have parties given for me, though mamma cares for the society of hardly anyone save Aunt Augusta. I remember the pucker between her eyebrows when one of my parties had to be given and it was suddenly discovered that the parlor maids had secretly broken most of the glass. That concerned the housekeeper, but at heart mamma was the housekeeper. She liked it. Housekeeping irritated her, but still she liked it, as a saint rejoicing in his hair shirt. Still she did it all, brave mamma, with her pretty brown eyes, her soft gray hair, her sweet, faintly silly conversation. I wouldn't have had her otherwise. She did her bit properly. (How horrified she would be if she could hear me saying of her anything so dreadful as "she did her bit.") She got Isab...