I suppose you're thinking now what a frivolous, shallow little beast
she is, and what a waste of money to educate a girl?
But, Daddy, if you'd been dressed in checked ginghams all your life,
you'd appreciate how I feel. And when I started to the high school, I
entered upon another period even worse than the checked ginghams.
The poor box.
You can't know how I dreaded appearing in school in those miserable
poor-box dresses. I was perfectly sure to be put down in class next to
the girl who first owned my dress, and she would whisper and giggle and
point it out to the others. The bitterness of wearing your enemies'
cast-off clothes eats into your soul. If I wore silk stockings for the
rest of my life, I don't believe I could obliterate the scar.
LATEST WAR BULLETIN!
News from the Scene of Action.
At the fourth watch on Thursday the 13th of November, Hannibal routed
the advance guard of the Romans and led the Carthaginian forces over
the mountains into the plains of Casilinum. A cohort of light armed
Numidians engaged the infantry of Quintus Fabius Maximus. Two battles
and light skirmishing. Romans repulsed with heavy losses.
I have the honour of being,
Your special correspondent from the front,
J. Abbott
PS. I know I'm not to expect any letters in return, and I've been
warned not to bother you with questions, but tell me, Daddy, just this
once--are you awfully old or just a little old? And are you perfectly
bald or just a little bald? It is very difficult thinking about you in
the abstract like a theorem in geometry.
Given a tall rich man who hates girls, but is very generous to one
quite impertinent girl, what does he look like?
R.S.V.P.
19th December
Dear Daddy-Long-Legs,
You never answered my question and it was very important.
ARE YOU BALD?
I have it planned exactly what you look like--very
satisfactorily--until I reach the top of your head, and then I AM
stuck. I can't decide whether you have white hair or black hair or
sort of sprinkly grey hair or maybe none at all.
Here is your portrait: But the problem is, shall I add some hair?
Would you like to know what colour your eyes are? They're grey, and
your eyebrows stick out like a porch roof (beetling, they're called in
novels), and your mouth is a straight line with a tendency to turn down
at the corners. Oh, you see, I know! You're a snappy old thing with a
temper.
(Chapel bell.) 9.45 p.m.
I have a new unbreakable rule: never, never to study at night no
matter how many written reviews are coming in the morning. Instead, I
read just plain books--I have to, you know, because there are eighteen
blank years behind me. You wouldn't believe, Daddy, what an abyss of
ignorance my mind is; I am just realizing the depths myself. The
things that most girls with a properly assorted family and a home and
friends and a library know by absorption, I have never heard of. For
example: I never read Mother Goose or David Copperfield or Ivanhoe or Cinderella
or Blue Beard or Robinson Crusoe or Jane Eyre or Alice in Wonderland or
a word of Rudyard Kipling. I didn't know that Henry the Eighth was
married more than once or that Shelley was a poet. I didn't know that
people used to be monkeys and that the Garden of Eden was a beautiful
myth. I didn't know that R. L. S. stood for Robert Louis Stevenson or
that George Eliot was a lady. I had never seen a picture of the 'Mona
Lisa' and (it's true but you won't believe it) I had never heard of
Sherlock Holmes.