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142
Sunday, June 8, 1930
[[strikethrough]] Monday, May 21, 1928 [[/strikethrough]]

Sunday, June 8.  Twenty days until we sail.  I have such great anticipations for the trip — I wonder if I shall be disappointed in them. 
 When I come back I am going up to Placid to visit Bob.  Somehow I can't believe that!  It sounds too perfect, being in a beautiful place, continuing this beautiful friendship, — will it really be such a marvelous time?  I have seen Bob twice, for a few minutes each time.  He is really remarkable about it all.  He has a real sportsmanlike streak in him, he is so alive and brave.  It is funny meeting people.  I should probably have been just as happy if I had never met him, but now I have met him, and I greedily hate to do without him.  Is it "love"?  I keep making up my mind that I won't bother labelling it — and yet I wonder.  If it is love, then love is grand, and if it isn't — well, love must really be the climax of all emotions.

The city is horrible now.  It is heavily hot.  The perspiring sort of heat.  Dust flying in open windows.  Sticky hands.  Double noise.  Grumpy people.  Cold soup — not quite jellied enough.  Slip-covers.  I can't feel at home with them.  They cover up and hide all the little associations I have with the room.  And when the slip covers come off the little memories have been so stifled with camphor and crinkly paper that they have died.  The feathers in the cushion in the Green Room that got over Bob's brown suit.  The window seal where


143
Tuesday, May 22, 1928

we kneeled and Bob got painty. The piano stool and Lincoln.  The coziness of drawn curtains Drawing on the back of the sofa.  All these are covered.  Of course one should feel sorry for slip-covers because they are invariably apologized for.  "Won't you excuse the way the room looks, Mrs. X?"  Perhaps I should be glad of them because they are heralds of vacations.  But vacation would come anyway-and I hate losing associations.  Silly of me perhaps.

Work at the Hudson Guild Kindergarten has been most tiring, but rather fun.  However, I get a feeling of uselessness from it.  The children are too young to grasp much, and instead of really helping them, it is the business of catering to them.  They are cute kids, alive, alone, and very eager.  I wonder how many of them will turn out well.  At first I thought it was terrible that these poor people should have so many children, but after all these children are a help, later, to supporting their parents.  The work has been fun, but, as I say, rather unsatisfactory.  I hope to get an older group next time I do this work.  I haven't seen Mr. McKloskey around at all, and I'm sorry about that.  I should like to know him.

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