November 20.
Dear Judy:
Your motherly solicitude is sweet, but I didn't mean what I said.
Of course it's perfectly safe to convey Judy, junior, to the temperately
tropical lands that are washed by the Caribbean. She'll thrive as
long as you don't set her absolutely on top of the equator. And your
bungalow, shaded by palms and fanned by sea breezes, with an ice machine
in the back yard and an English doctor across the bay, sounds made for
the rearing of babies.
My objections were all due to the selfish fact that I and the John Grier
are going to be lonely without you this winter. I really think it's
entrancing to have a husband who engages in such picturesque pursuits
as financing tropical railroads and developing asphalt lakes and rubber
groves and mahogany forests. I wish that Gordon would take to life
in those picturesque countries; I'd be more thrilled by the romantic
possibilities of the future. Washington seems awfully commonplace
compared with Honduras and Nicaragua and the islands of the Caribbean.
I'll be down to wave good-by.
ADDIO!
SALLIE.
November 24.
Dear Gordon:
Judy has gone back to town, and is sailing next week for Jamaica, where
she is to make her headquarters while Jervis cruises about adjacent
waters on these entertaining new ventures of his. Couldn't you engage in
traffic in the South Seas? I think I'd feel pleasanter about leaving my
asylum if you had something romantic and adventurous to offer instead.
And think how beautiful you'd be in those white linen clothes! I really
believe I might be able to stay in love with a man quite permanently if
he always dressed in white.
You can't imagine how I miss Judy. Her absence leaves a dreadful hole in
my afternoons. Can't you run up for a week end soon? I think the sight
of you would be very cheering, and I'm feeling awfully down of late.
You know, my dear Gordon, I like you much better when you're right here
before my eyes than when I merely think about you from a distance. I
believe you must have a sort of hypnotic influence. Occasionally, after
you've been away a long time, your spell wears a little thin. But when I
see you, it all comes back. You've been away now a long, long time; so,
please come fast and bewitch me over again!
S.
December 2.
Dear Judy:
Do you remember in college, when you and I used to plan our favorite
futures, how we were forever turning our faces southward? And now to
think it has really come true, and you are there, coasting around those
tropical isles! Did you ever have such a thrill in the whole of your
life, barring one or two connected with Jervis, as when you came up on
deck in the early dawn and found yourself riding at anchor in the harbor
of Kingston, with the water so blue and the palms so green and the beach
so white?