much!" Or, "When I think of how children shut a mother up"
There were times when Alice's former chum, Sue Grayson, exasperated her almost as much as did her mother-in-law. She would come to call, bringing her only child and crying,
"Well, how you manage it I don't know! Gladys is enough for me. And the expense!"
It was when baited beyond endurance by talk like this that Alice asserted,
"I think that three children is a miserable little family. I want at least two more."
She said this before Sue Grayson and her mother-in-law and she said it defiantly. Alice's hair was red, and she had a high and sparkling temper. Sue Grayson rested an uncomprehending gaze on Alice, such a gaze one rests on a lower animal, a rabbit or a guinea pig, for instance.
"Enough is enough," said she definitely if cryptically. "Impassed in domesticity, what becomes of a woman's higher spiritual nature? It dies. The spiritual nature, to continue to exist, must have adventure."
It annoyed Alice to the point of wishing to stamp feet not to be able to explain what she felt to these two superior women.
Her mother-in-law murmured with austere self-congratulation:
"I could never bring myself to call but one human soul from the unknown!"
Only her early training prevented Alice from crying "Bosh and rubbish!" while from childhood there rushed over her a desire to snap her fingers and stamp her foot which, when you are young, is a satisfactory way of expressing the emotion of anger. When her mother-in-law spoke about the unknown, and her friend
