Loretta is to learn housework and have a little garden of her own, and
particularly play out of doors in the sunshine. She is to go to bed
early and be fed up on nice nourishing food, and they are to pet her and
make her happy. All this for three dollars a week!
Why not find a hundred such families, and board out all the children?
Then this building could be turned into an idiot asylum, and I, not
knowing anything about idiots, could conscientiously resign and go back
home and live happily ever after.
Really, Judy, I am growing frightened. This asylum will get me if I stay
long enough. I am becoming so interested in it that I can't think or
talk or dream of anything else. You and Jervis have blasted all my
prospects in life.
Suppose I should retire and marry and have a family. As families go
nowadays, I couldn't hope for more than five or six children at the
most, and all with the same heredity. But, mercy! such a family appears
perfectly insignificant and monotonous. You have institutionalized me.
Reproachfully yours,
SALLIE McBRIDE.
P.S. We have a child here whose father was lynched. Isn't that a piquant
detail to have in one's history?
Tuesday.
Dearest Judy:
What shall we do? Mamie Prout does not like prunes. This antipathy to a
cheap and healthful foodstuff is nothing but imagination, and ought
not to be countenanced among the inmates of a well-managed institution.
Mamie must be made to like prunes. So says our grammar teacher, who
spends the noonday hour with us and overlooks the morals of our charges.
About one o'clock today she marched Mamie to my office charged with the
offense of refusing, ABSOLUTELY refusing, to open her mouth and put in
a prune. The child was plumped down on a stool to await punishment from
me.
Now, as you know, I do not like bananas, and I should hate awfully to be
forced to swallow them; so, by the same token, why should I force Mamie
Prout to swallow prunes?
While I was pondering a course that would seem to uphold Miss Keller's
authority, but would at the same time leave a loophole for Mamie, I was
called to the telephone.
"Sit there until I come back," I said, and went out and closed the door.
The message was from a kind lady wishing to motor me to a committee
meeting. I didn't tell you that I am organizing local interest in our
behalf. The idle rich who possess estates in this neighborhood are
beginning to drift out from town, and I am laying my plans to catch
them before they are deflected by too many garden parties and tennis
tournaments. They have never been of the slightest use to this asylum,
and I think it's about time they woke up to a realization of our
presence.