Bettie Flynn, who lives at the City Home because of
epileptic fits, also comes in occasionally. Bettie is a friend of Mrs.
Mundy. Owing to kinlessness and inability to care for herself, owing,
also, to there being nowhere else to which she could go, she has been
forced to enter the Home. Her caustic comments on its management are
of a clear-cut variety. Bettie was born for a satirist and became an
epileptic. The result at times is speech that is not guarded, a
calling of things by names that are their own.
These and various others who are facing at short range realities of
which I have long been personally ignorant, are taking me into new
worlds, pumping streams of new understandings, new outreaches, into my
brain and heart, and life has become big and many-sided, and a thing
not to be wasted. Myself of the old life I am seeing as I never saw
before, seeing in a perspective that does not fill with pride.
Last night I went to my first dinner-party since Aunt Matilda's death.
In Kitty's car I watched with interest, on the way to her house, the
long stretches of dingy streets, then cleaner ones, with their old and
comfortable houses; the park, with its bare trees and shrubs, and
finally the Avenue, with its smooth paving and pretentious homes, its
hurrying cars of luxurious make, its air of conscious smartness.
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