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To Mr. Daddy-Long-Legs Smith

October 1st

 

Dear Daddy-Long-Legs,

 

I love college and I love you for sending me – I’m very, very happy, and so excited every moment of the time that I can hardly sleep. You can’t imagine how different it is from the John Grier Home. I never dreamed there was such a place in the world. I’m feeling sorry for everybody who isn’t a girl and who can’t come here; I am sure the college you attended when you were a boy couldn’t have been so nice.

My room is up in a tower that used to be the contagious ward before they built the new infirmary. There are three other girls on the same floor of the tower – a Senior who wears spectacles and is always asking us please to be a little more quiet, and two Freshmen named Sallie McBride and Julia Rutledge Pendleton. Sallie has red hair and a turn-up nose and is quite friendly; Julia comes from one of the first families in New York and hasn’t noticed me yet. They room together and the Senior and I have singles. Usually Freshmen can’t get singles; they are very few, but I got one without even asking. I suppose the registrar didn’t think it would be right to ask a properly brought up girl to room with a foundling. You see there are advantages!

After you’ve lived in a ward for eighteen years with twenty room-mates, it is restful to be alone. This is the first chance I’ve ever had to get acquainted with Jerusha Abbott. I think I’m going to like her.

Do you think you are?

 

 

Tuesday

 

They are organizing the Freshman basket-ball team and there’s just a chance that I shall get in it. I’m little of course, but terribly quick and strong. While the others are hopping about in the air, I can get under their feet and grab the ball. It’s a lot of fun practising – out in the athletic field in the afternoon with the trees all red and yellow and the air full of the smell of burning leaves, and everybody laughing and shouting. These are the happiest girls I ever saw – and I am the happiest of all!

I meant to write a long letter and tell you all the things I’m learning (Mrs. Lippett said you wanted to know), but 7th hour has just rung, and in ten minutes I’m due at the athletic field in sport clothes.

Don’t you hope I’ll make the team?

 

Yours always,

Jerusha Abbott

 

PS. (9 o’clock.)

Sallie McBride just put her head in at my door. This is what she said:

“I’m so homesick that I simply can’t stand it. Do you feel that way?”

I smiled a little and said no; I thought I could pull through. At least homesickness is one disease that I’ve escaped! I never heard of anybody being asylumsick, did you?

 

 

October 10th

 

Dear Daddy-Long-Legs,

 

Did you ever hear of Michael Angelo? He was a famous artist who lived in Italy in the Middle Ages. Everybody in English Literature seemed to know about him, and the whole class laughed because I thought he was an archangel. He sounds like an archangel, doesn’t he? The trouble with college is that you are expected to know such a lot of things you’ve never learned. It’s very confusing at times. But now, when the girls talk about things that I’v never heard of, I just keep still and look them up in the encyclopedia.



I made an awful mistake the first day. Somebody mentioned Maurice Maeterlinck, and I asked if she was a Freshman. That joke has gone all over college. But anyway, I’m just as bright in class as any of the others – and brighter than some of them!

Sallie is the most amusing person in the world – and Julia Rutledge Pendleton the least so. It’s strange what a mixture the registrar can make in the matter of roommates. Sallie thinks everything is funny – even flunking – and Julia is bored at everything. She never makes the slightest effort to be amiable. She believes that if you are a Pendleton, that fact alone admits you to heaven without any further examination. Julia and I were born to be enemies.

 

Jerusha Abbott

 

 

Wednesday

 

Dear Daddy-Long-Legs,

 

I’ve changed my name.

I’m still “Jerusha” in the catalogue, but I’m “Judy” everywhere else. I didn’t quite make up the Judy though. That’s what Freddy Perkins used to call me before he could talk plainly.

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.

(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 is to turn the ninety-seven orphans into ninety-seven twins.

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.

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 hanging 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 difference, do you?

Anyway, Sallie McBride likes me!

 

Yours ever,

Judy Abbott (Nee Jerusha.)

 

 

October 25th

 

Dear Daddy-Long-Legs,

 

I’m in the basketball team and you ought to see the bruise on my left shoulder. It’s blue and mahogany with little streaks of orange. Julia Pendleton tried for the team, but she didn’t get in. Hooray! You see what a mean disposition I have. College gets nicer and nicer. I like the girls and the teachers and the classes and the campus and the things to eat. We have ice-cream twice a week and we never have corn-meal mush.

You only wanted to hear from me once a month, didn’t you? And I’ve been peppering you with letters every few days! But I’ve been so excited about all these new adventures that I MUST talk to somebody; and you’re the only one I know. Please excuse my being so chatty; I’ll settle pretty soon. If my letters bore you, you can always throw them into the waste-basket. I promise not to write another till the middle of November.

 

Yours most talkative,

Judy Abbott

 

 

November 15th

 

Dear Daddy-Long-Legs,

 

You’ve never heard about my clothes, have you, Daddy? Six dresses, all new and beautiful and bought for me – not handed down from somebody bigger. You gave them to me, and I am very, very, VERY much obliged. It’s a fine thing to be educated – but it’s nothing compared to the dizzying experience of owning six new dresses.

I suppose you’re thinking now what a frivolous, shallow little beast she is, and what a waste of money to educate a girl?

But, Daddy, if you’d been dressed in checked ginghams all your life, you’d appreciate how I feel. And when I started to the high school, I entered upon another period even worse than the checked ginghams.

You can’t know how I feared appearing in school in those miserable poor-box dresses. I was perfectly sure to be put down in class next to the girl who first owned my dress, and she would whisper and giggle and point it out to the others. The bitterness of wearing your enemies’ cast-off clothes eats into your soul.

P.S. I know I’m not to expect any letters in return, and I’ve been warned not to bother you with questions, but tell me, Daddy, just this once – are you awfully old or just a little old? And are you perfectly bald or just a little bald? It is very difficult thinking about you in the abstract like a theorem in geometry.

Given a tall rich man who hates girls, but is very generous to one quite impertinent girl, what does he look like?

 

R.S.V.P.

 

 

December 19th

 

Dear Daddy-Long-Legs,

 

You never answered my question and it was very important. ARE YOU BALD?

I have it planned exactly what you look like – very satisfactorily – until I reach the top of your head, and then I stop. I can’t decide whether you have white hair or black hair or sort of sprinkly grey hair or maybe none at all.

Would you like to know what colour your eyes are? They’re grey, and your eyebrows stick out like a porch roof, and your mouth is a straight line with a tendency to turn down at the corners. Oh, you see, I know! You’re an actual old thing with a temper.

(Chapel bell.)

 

 

P.m.

 

I have a new unbreakable rule: never to study at night no matter how many written reviews are coming in the morning. Instead, I read just plain books – I have to, you know, because there are eighteen blank years behind me. You wouldn’t believe, Daddy, what an abyss of ignorance my mind is; I am just realizing the depths myself.

I never read “Mother Goose” or “David Copperfield” or “Ivanhoe” or “Cinderella” or “Blue Beard” or “Robinson Crusoe” or “Jane Eyre” or “Alice in Wonderland” or a word of Rudyard Kipling. I didn’t know that Henry the Eighth was married more than once or that Shelley was a poet. I didn’t know that people used to be monkeys and that the Garden of Eden was a beautiful myth. I didn’t know that George Eliot was a lady. I had never seen a picture of the “Mona Lisa” and (it’s true but you won’t believe it) I had never heard of Sherlock Holmes.

Now, I know all of these things and a lot of others besides, but you can see how much I need to catch up. And oh, but it’s fun! I look forward all day to evening, and then I put a “do not disturb” on the door and get into my nice red bath robe and furry slippers and pile all the cushions behind me on the couch, and light the lamp at my elbow, and read and read and read. One book isn’t enough. I have four going at once. Just now, they’re Tennyson’s poems and “Vanity Fair” and Kipling’s “Plain Tales”. I find that I am the only girl in college who wasn’t brought up on “Little Women”. I haven’t told anybody though (that would stamp me as strange). I just quietly went and bought it with $1.12 of my last month’s allowance.

(Ten o’clock bell. This is a very interrupted letter.)

 

 

Sunday

 

The Christmas holidays begin next week and the trunks are up. The corridors are so filled up that you can hardly get through, and everybody is so noisy with excitement that studying is getting left out. I’m going to have a beautiful time in vacation; there’s another Freshman who lives in Texas staying behind, and we are planning to take long walks and if there’s any ice – learn to skate. Then there is still the whole library to be read – and three empty weeks to do it in!

Goodbye, Daddy, I hope that you are feeling as happy as am.

 

Yours ever,

Judy

 

P.S. Don’t forget to answer my question. If you don’t want the trouble of writing, have your secretary telegraph. He can just say:

Mr. Smith is quite bald,

or

Mr. Smith is not bald,

or

Mr. Smith has white hair.

And you can spend the twenty-five cents out of my allowance.

Goodbye till January – and a merry Christmas!

 

 

Towards the end of


Date: 2016-03-03; view: 1320


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