Do you want to know something? I have three pairs of kid gloves. I've
had kid mittens before from the Christmas tree, but never real kid
gloves with five fingers. I take them out and try them on every little
while. It's all I can do not to wear them to classes.
(Dinner bell. Goodbye.)
Friday
What do you think, Daddy? The English instructor said that my last
paper shows an unusual amount of originality. She did, truly. Those
were her words. It doesn't seem possible, does it, considering the
eighteen years of training that I've had? The aim of the John Grier
Home (as you doubtless know and heartily approve of) is to turn the
ninety-seven orphans into ninety-seven twins.
The unusual artistic ability which I exhibit was developed at an early
age through drawing chalk pictures of Mrs. Lippett on the woodshed door.
I hope that I don't hurt your feelings when I criticize the home of my
youth? But you have the upper hand, you know, for if I become too
impertinent, you can always stop payment of your cheques. That isn't a
very polite thing to say--but you can't expect me to have any manners;
a foundling asylum isn't a young ladies' finishing school.
You know, Daddy, it isn't the work that is going to be hard in college.
It's the play. Half the time I don't know what the girls are talking
about; their jokes seem to relate to a past that every one but me has
shared. I'm a foreigner in the world and I don't understand the
language. It's a miserable feeling. I've had it all my life. At the
high school the girls would stand in groups and just look at me. I was
queer and different and everybody knew it. I could FEEL 'John Grier
Home' written on my face. And then a few charitable ones would make a
point of coming up and saying something polite. I HATED EVERY ONE OF
THEM--the charitable ones most of all.
Nobody here knows that I was brought up in an asylum. I told Sallie
McBride that my mother and father were dead, and that a kind old
gentleman was sending me to college which is entirely true so far as it
goes. I don't want you to think I am a coward, but I do want to be
like the other girls, and that Dreadful Home looming over my childhood
is the one great big difference. If I can turn my back on that and
shut out the remembrance, I think, I might be just as desirable as any
other girl. I don't believe there's any real, underneath difference,
do you?