I'm LONGING to go back and begin work.
Yours ever,
Jerusha Abbott, Author of When the Sophomores Won
the Game. For sale at all news stands, price ten cents.
26th September
Dear Daddy-Long-Legs,
Back at college again and an upper classman. Our study is better than
ever this year--faces the South with two huge windows and oh! so
furnished. Julia, with an unlimited allowance, arrived two days early
and was attacked with a fever for settling.
We have new wall paper and oriental rugs and mahogany chairs--not
painted mahogany which made us sufficiently happy last year, but real.
It's very gorgeous, but I don't feel as though I belonged in it; I'm
nervous all the time for fear I'll get an ink spot in the wrong place.
And, Daddy, I found your letter waiting for me--pardon--I mean your
secretary's.
Will you kindly convey to me a comprehensible reason why I should not
accept that scholarship? I don't understand your objection in the
least. But anyway, it won't do the slightest good for you to object,
for I've already accepted it and I am not going to change! That sounds
a little impertinent, but I don't mean it so.
I suppose you feel that when you set out to educate me, you'd like to
finish the work, and put a neat period, in the shape of a diploma, at
the end.
But look at it just a second from my point of view. I shall owe my
education to you just as much as though I let you pay for the whole of
it, but I won't be quite so much indebted. I know that you don't want
me to return the money, but nevertheless, I am going to want to do it,
if I possibly can; and winning this scholarship makes it so much
easier. I was expecting to spend the rest of my life in paying my
debts, but now I shall only have to spend one-half of the rest of it.
I hope you understand my position and won't be cross. The allowance I
shall still most gratefully accept. It requires an allowance to live
up to Julia and her furniture! I wish that she had been reared to
simpler tastes, or else that she were not my room-mate.
This isn't much of a letter; I meant to have written a lot--but I've
been hemming four window curtains and three portieres (I'm glad you
can't see the length of the stitches), and polishing a brass desk set
with tooth powder (very uphill work), and sawing off picture wire with
manicure scissors, and unpacking four boxes of books, and putting away
two trunkfuls of clothes (it doesn't seem believable that Jerusha
Abbott owns two trunks full of clothes, but she does!) and welcoming
back fifty dear friends in between.