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
THE INFIRMARY
4th April
Dearest Daddy-Long-Legs,
Yesterday evening just towards dark, when I was sitting up in bed
looking out at the rain and feeling awfully bored with life in a great
institution, the nurse appeared with a long white box addressed to me,
and filled with the LOVELIEST pink rosebuds. And much nicer still, it
contained a card with a very polite message written in a funny little
uphill back hand (but one which shows a great deal of character). Thank
you, Daddy, a thousand times. Your flowers make the first real, true
present I ever received in my life. If you want to know what a baby I
am I lay down and cried because I was so happy.