46～50

46. My mother had a good deal of trouble with me but I think she enjoyed it. She had none at all with my brother Henry, who was two years younger than I, and I think that the unbroken monotony of his goodness and truthfulness and obedience would have been a burden to her but for the relief and variety which I furnished in the other direction. I was a tonic to her. I was valuable to her.

47. Most people, the vast majority in fact, lead the lives that circumstances have thrust upon them, and though some repine, looking upon themselves as round pegs in square holes, and think that if things had been different they might have made a much better showing, the greater part accept their lot, if not with serenity, at all events with resignation. They are like tramcars travelling for ever on the selfsame rails. They go backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards, inevitably, till they can go no longer and then are sold as scrap-iron.

48. I wanted to be a cowboy, I told Father on the way home. He chuckled and said no, I didn't. He said I might as well be a tramp. I wondered if I'd better tell him that this idea had occurred to me, ng further back than that very morning. I decided that upon the whole it mightn't be a good day to mention it, just after Father had taken me to lunch at Delmonico's. I did venture to ask him, however, what was the matter with cowboys.

49. The other day a well-known English novelist asked me how old I thought she was, really. “Well," I say to myself, “since she has asked for it, she shall have it; I will be as true to life as her novels.” So I replied audaciously: “Thirty-eight." I fancied, if at all, on the side of “really.” And I trembled. She laughed triumphantly. “I am forty three,” she said.

50. Not the least of the Zoological Gardens' many attractions .. is their inexhaustibility. There is always something new, and-what is not less satisfactory—there is something old that you had previously missed. How is that? How is it that one may go to-the Zoo a thousand times and consistently overlook one of the most ingratiating denizens, and then on the thousand-and-first visit come upon this creature as though he was the latest arrival? There the quaint little absurdity was, all that long while, as ready to be seen as today, but you never saw him, or, at any rate, you never noticed him. The time was not yet.