I’ve just had a letter from Uncle Carlton. It’s a very long and businesslike letter, in which he goes into details as to how our company has been incorporated in La Association de Productores de Salitre de Chile, with headquarters at Valparaiso. It’s a new and rather unexpected arrangement, but he prophesies that with nitrate at ten shillings per Spanish quintal the returns on the investment, under the newer conditions, should be quite satisfactory. He goes on to explain how nitrate is shipped in bags of one hundred kilos, and the price includes the bags, but the weight is taken on the nitrate only, involving a deduction from the gross weight of seven-tenths per cent. Then he ambles off into a long discussion of how the fixation method from the air may eventually threaten the stability of our entire amalgamated mines, but probably not during his life-time or even my own. And I had to read the letter over for the third time before I winnowed from it the obscure but essential kernel that my shares from this year forward should bring me in an annual dividend of at least two thousand, but more probably three, and possibly even four, once the transportation situation is normalized, but depending largely, of course, on the labor conditions obtaining in Latin America—and much more along the same lines.

That news of my long-forgotten and long-neglected nest-egg should have made me happy. But it didn’t. I couldn’t quite react to it. As usual, I thought of the children first, and from their standpoint it did bring a sort of relief. It was consoling, of course, to know that, whatever happened, they could have woolens on their little tummies and shoe-leather on their little piggies. But the news didn’t come with sufficient force to shock the dull gray emptiness out of existence. I’ve even been wondering if there’s any news that could. For the one thing that seems always to face me is the absence of intensity from life. Can it be, I found myself asking to-day, that it’s youth, golden youth, that is slipping away from me?

It startled me a little, to have to face that question. But I shake my fist in the teeth of Time. I refuse to surrender. I shall not allow myself to become antiquated. I’m on the wrong track, in some way, but before I dry up into a winter apple I’m going to find out where the trouble is, and correct it. I never was much of a sleep-walker. I want life, Life—and oodles of it....

Among other things, by the way, which I’ve been missing are books. They at least are to be had for the buying, and I’ve decided there’s no excuse for letting the channels of my mind get moss-grown. I’ve had a “serious but not fatal wound,” as the newspapers say, to my personal vanity, but there’s no use in letting go of things, at my time of life. Pee-Wee, I’m sure, will never be satisfied with an empty-headed old frump for a mother, and Dinkie is already asking questions that are slightly disturbing. Yesterday, in his bath, he held his hand over his heart. He held it there for quite a long time, and then he looked at me with widening eyes. “Mummy,” he called out, “I’ve got a m’sheen inside me!” And Whinnie’s explorations are surely worth emulating. I too have a machine inside me which some day I’ll be compelled to rediscover. It is a machine which, at present, is merely a pump, though the ancients, I believe, regarded it as the seat of the emotions.