get married, and he smiled and said: “My dear Miss Milsom, half my patients come to me because they are not married—and the other half because they are!” We had quite a laugh about it. He is very nice and rather good-looking, but he doesn’t seem to think it necessary for all his patients to fall in love with him, like that odd man I went to see in Wimpole Street, who suffered so dreadfully from halitosis.
Well, anyway, he asked me what I was interested in, and I said I’d always had an idea I should like to write . He said that was an awfully good idea, and I ought to encourage it by trying my hand at a little sketch or article every day, or by just putting down my observations of people and things as I saw them. I’m sure I get subjects enough in this house, as far as matrimony goes, anyhow. Indeed, my dear, from what I see of men, I’m very glad there are other ways out of my troubles than what Dr. Trevor calls the direct way!! Do you mind, please, not throwing my letters away—just stick them in one of the drawers in my old desk when you’ve finished with them, because I think I might use some of the funny little incidents that happen here to work up into a novel some time. One puts these things down when they are fresh in one’s mind, and then one forgets about them.
Well, we are jogging along here in our usual placid way—with the usual little outbreaks, of course, when a meal goes wrong, as they will sometimes, with all my care. Mr. Harrison is such an expert, you know, that it is very hard for a person with only one pair of hands to keep everything up to his high standard. And, fond though I am, and always shall be, of dear Mrs. Harrison, I do sometimes wish that she was just a little more practical. If anything at all is left to her to do, she is so apt to lose herself in a book or a daydream and forget all about it. She always says she ought to have been born to ten thousand a year—but who of us could not say that? I always feel myself that I was really meant to “sit on a cushion and sew a fine seam”—you remember the games we used to play about being princesses in the Arabian Nights, with a train of a hundred