Life is monotonous enough at best; you have to eat and sleep about so often.
But imagine how DEADLY monotonous it would be if nothing unexpected could happen between meals.
Mercy!
Daddy, there's a blot, but I'm on the third page and I can't begin a new sheet.
I'm going on with biology again this year—very interesting subject; we're studying the alimentary system at present.
You should see how sweet a cross-section of the duodenum of a cat is under the microscope.
Also we've arrived at philosophy—interesting but evanescent.
I prefer biology where you can pin the subject under discussion to a board.
There's another!
And another!
This pen is weeping copiously.
Please excuse its tears.
Do you believe in free will?
I do—unreservedly.
I don't agree at all with the philosophers who think that every action is the absolutely inevitable and automatic resultant of an aggregation of remote causes.
That's the most immoral doctrine I ever heard—nobody would be to blame for anything.
If a man believed in fatalism, he would naturally just sit down and say,
'The Lord's will be done,' and continue to sit until he fell over dead.
I believe absolutely in my own free will and my own power to accomplish—and that is the belief that moves mountains.
You watch me become a great author!
I have four chapters of my new book finished and five more drafted.
This is a very abstruse letter—does your head ache, Daddy?
I think we'll stop now and make some fudge.
I'm sorry I can't send you a piece; it will be unusually good, for we're going to make it with real cream and three butter balls.
Yours affectionately, Judy
PS.
We're having fancy dancing in gymnasium class.
You can see by the accompanying picture how much we look like a real ballet.
The one at the end accomplishing a graceful pirouette is me—I mean I.
26th December
My Dear, Dear, Daddy,
Haven't you any sense?
Don't you KNOW that you mustn't give one girl seventeen Christmas presents?
I'm a Socialist, please remember; do you wish to turn me into a Plutocrat?
Think how embarrassing it would be if we should ever quarrel!
I should have to engage a moving-van to return your gifts.
I am sorry that the necktie I sent was so wobbly; I knit it with my own hands (as you doubtless discovered from internal evidence).
You will have to wear it on cold days and keep your coat buttoned up tight.
Thank you, Daddy, a thousand times.
I think you're the sweetest man that ever lived—and the foolishest!
Judy
Here's a four-leaf clover from Camp McBride to bring you good luck for the New Year.
9th January
Do you wish to do something, Daddy, that will ensure your eternal salvation?
There is a family here who are in awfully desperate straits.
A mother and father and four visible children—the two older boys have disappeared into the world to make their fortune and have not sent any of it back.
The father worked in a glass factory and got consumption—it's awfully unhealthy work—and now has been sent away to a hospital.
That took all their savings, and the support of the family falls upon the oldest daughter, who is twenty-four.
She dressmakes for $1.50 a day (when she can get it) and embroiders centrepieces in the evening.
The mother isn't very strong and is extremely ineffectual and pious.