Should you mind, just for a little while, pretending you are my grandmother?
Sallie has one and Julia and Leonora each two, and they were all comparing them tonight.
I can't think of anything I'd rather have; it's such a respectable relationship.
So, if you really don't object—When I went into town yesterday, I saw the sweetest cap of Cluny lace trimmed with lavender ribbon.
I am going to make you a present of it on your eighty-third birthday.
! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !
That's the clock in the chapel tower striking twelve.
I believe I am sleepy after all.
Good night, Granny.
I love you dearly.
Judy
The Ides of March
Dear D.-L.-L.,
I am studying Latin prose composition.
I have been studying it.
I shall be studying it.
I shall be about to have been studying it.
My re-examination comes the 7th hour next Tuesday, and I am going to pass or BUST.
So you may expect to hear from me next, whole and happy and free from conditions, or in fragments.
I will write a respectable letter when it's over.
Tonight I have a pressing engagement with the Ablative Absolute.
Yours—in evident haste J. A.
26th March
Mr. D.-L.-L. Smith,
SIR: You never answer any questions; you never show the slightest interest in anything I do.
You are probably the horridest one of all those horrid Trustees, and the reason you are educating me is, not because you care a bit about me, but from a sense of Duty.
I don't know a single thing about you.
I don't even know your name.
It is very uninspiring writing to a Thing.
I haven't a doubt but that you throw my letters into the waste-basket without reading them.
Hereafter I shall write only about work.
My re-examinations in Latin and geometry came last week.
I passed them both and am now free from conditions.
Yours truly, Jerusha Abbott
2nd April
Dear Daddy-Long-Legs,
I am a BEAST.
Please forget about that dreadful letter I sent you last week—I was feeling terribly lonely and miserable and sore-throaty the night I wrote.
I didn't know it, but I was just sickening for tonsillitis and grippe and lots of things mixed.
I'm in the infirmary now, and have been here for six days; this is the first time they would let me sit up and have a pen and paper. The head nurse is very bossy.
But I've been thinking about it all the time and I shan't get well until you forgive me.
Here is a picture of the way I look, with a bandage tied around my head in rabbit's ears.
Doesn't that arouse your sympathy?
I am having sublingual gland swelling.
And I've been studying physiology all the year without ever hearing of sublingual glands.
How futile a thing is education!
I can't write any more; I get rather shaky when I sit up too long.
Please forgive me for being impertinent and ungrateful.
I was badly brought up.
Yours with love, Judy Abbott