10th October
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 embarrassing at times. But now,
when the girls talk about
things that I 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!
Do you care to know how I've furnished my
room? It's a symphony
in brown and yellow. The wall was tinted
buff, and I've bought
yellow denim curtains and cushions and a
mahogany desk (second hand
for three dollars) and a rattan chair and
a brown rug with an ink
spot in the middle. I stand the chair
over the spot.
The windows are up high; you can't look
out from an ordinary seat.
But I unscrewed the looking-glass from
the back of the bureau,
upholstered the top and moved it up
against the window. It's just
the right height for a window seat. You
pull out the drawers like
steps and walk up. Very comfortable!
Sallie McBride helped me choose the
things at the Senior auction.
She has lived in a house all her life and
knows about furnishing.
You can't imagine what fun it is to shop
and pay with a real
five-dollar bill and get some
change--when you've never had more than
a few cents in your life. I assure you,
Daddy dear, I do appreciate
that allowance.
Sallie is the most entertaining person in
the world--and Julia
Rutledge Pendleton the least so. It's
queer what a mixture
the registrar can make in the matter of
room-mates. 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.
And now I suppose you've been waiting
very impatiently to hear
what I am learning?
I. Latin: Second Punic war. Hannibal and
his forces pitched camp
at Lake Trasimenus last night. They
prepared an ambuscade for
the Romans, and a battle took place at
the fourth watch this morning.
Romans in retreat.
II. French: 24 pages of the Three
Musketeers and third conjugation,
irregular verbs.
III. Geometry: Finished cylinders; now
doing cones.
IV. English: Studying exposition. My
style improves daily
in clearness and brevity.
V. Physiology: Reached the digestive
system. Bile and the pancreas
next time. Yours, on the way to being
educated,
Jerusha Abbott
PS. I hope you never touch alcohol,
Daddy? It does dreadful
things to your liver.
Wednesday
Dear Daddy-Long-Legs,
I've changed my name.
I'm still `Jerusha' in the catalogue, but
I'm `Judy' everywhere else.
It's really too bad, isn't it, to have to
give yourself the only
pet name you ever had? I didn't quite
make up the Judy though.
That's what Freddy Perkins used to call
me before he could
talk plainly.
I wish Mrs. Lippett would use a little
more ingenuity about choosing
babies' names. She gets the last names
out of the telephone book--
you'll find Abbott on the first page--and
she picks the Christian
names up anywhere; she got Jerusha from a
tombstone. I've always
hated it; but I rather like Judy. It's
such a silly name.
It belongs to the kind of girl I'm not--a
sweet little blue-eyed thing,
petted and spoiled by all the family, who
romps her way through
life without any cares. Wouldn't it be
nice to be like that?
Whatever faults I may have, no one can
ever accuse me of having been
spoiled by my family! But it's great fun
to pretend I've been.
In the future please always address me as
Judy.
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?
Anyway, Sallie McBride likes me!
Yours ever,
Judy Abbott
(Nee Jerusha.)
Saturday morning
I've just been reading this letter over
and it sounds pretty
un-cheerful. But can't you guess that I
have a special topic due
Monday morning and a review in geometry
and a very sneezy cold?
Sunday
I forgot to post this yesterday, so I
will add an indignant postscript.
We had a bishop this morning, and WHAT DO
YOU THINK HE SAID?
`The most beneficent promise made us in
the Bible is this,
"The poor ye have always with
you." They were put here in order
to keep us charitable.'
The poor, please observe, being a sort of
useful domestic animal.
If I hadn't grown into such a perfect
lady, I should have gone up
after service and told him what I
thought.
25th October
Dear Daddy-Long-Legs,
I'm in the basket-ball 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 exuberance;
I'll settle pretty soon. If my letters
bore you, you can always
toss them into the wastebasket. I promise
not to write another till
the middle of November.
Yours most loquaciously,
Judy Abbott
15th November
Dear Daddy-Long-Legs,
Listen to what I've learned to-day.
The area of the convex surface of the
frustum of a regular pyramid
is half the product of the sum of the
perimeters of its bases
by the altitude of either of its
trapezoids.
It doesn't sound true, but it is--I can
prove it!
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. Perhaps you don't
realize what a climax that marks
in the career of an orphan? You gave them
to me, and I am very, very,
VERY much obliged. It's a fine thing to
be educated--but nothing
compared to the dizzying experience of
owning six new dresses.
Miss Pritchard, who is on the visiting
committee, picked them out--
not Mrs. Lippett, thank goodness. I have
an evening dress, pink mull
over silk (I'm perfectly beautiful in
that), and a blue church dress,
and a dinner dress of red veiling with
Oriental trimming (makes
me look like a Gipsy), and another of
rose-coloured challis,
and a grey street suit, and an every-day
dress for classes.
That wouldn't be an awfully big wardrobe
for Julia Rutledge Pendleton,
perhaps, but for Jerusha Abbott--Oh, my!
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.
The poor box.
You can't know how I dreaded 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.
If I wore silk stockings for the rest of
my life, I don't believe
I could obliterate the scar.
LATEST WAR BULLETIN!
News from the Scene of Action.
At the fourth watch on Thursday the 13th
of November, Hannibal routed
the advance guard of the Romans and led
the Carthaginian forces
over the mountains into the plains of
Casilinum. A cohort of light
armed Numidians engaged the infantry of
Quintus Fabius Maximus.
Two battles and light skirmishing. Romans
repulsed with heavy losses.
I have the honour of being,
Your special correspondent from the
front,
J. Abbott
PS. 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.
19th December
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 AM stuck. I can't
decide whether you have white hair or
black hair or sort of sprinkly
grey hair or maybe none at all.
Here is your portrait:
But the problem is, shall I add some
hair?
Would you like to know what colour your
eyes are? They're grey,
and your eyebrows stick out like a porch
roof (beetling, they're
called in novels), and your mouth is a
straight line with a tendency
to turn down at the corners. Oh, you see,
I know! You're a snappy
old thing with a temper.
(Chapel bell.)
9.45 p.m.
I have a new unbreakable rule: never,
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.
The things that most girls with a
properly assorted family and a home
and friends and a library know by
absorption, I have never heard of.
For example:
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 R. L. S. stood
for Robert Louis Stevenson or 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 an `engaged' 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 brass student
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
and--don't laugh--Little Women.
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 queer). I just quietly went and bought
it with $1.12 of my last
month's allowance; and the next time
somebody mentions pickled limes,
I'll know what she is talking about!
(Ten o'clock bell. This is a very
interrupted letter.)
Saturday
Sir,
I have the honour to report fresh
explorations in the field of geometry.
On Friday last we abandoned our former
works in parallelopipeds
and proceeded to truncated prisms. We are
finding the road rough
and very uphill.
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 bubbling over 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
PS. 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 deduct the twenty-five cents
out of my allowance.
Goodbye till January--and a merry
Christmas!
Towards the end of
the Christmas vacation.
Exact date unknown
Dear Daddy-Long-Legs,
Is it snowing where you are? All the
world that I see from my tower
is draped in white and the flakes are
coming down as big as pop-corns.
It's late afternoon--the sun is just
setting (a cold yellow colour)
behind some colder violet hills, and I am
up in my window seat
using the last light to write to you.
Your five gold pieces were a surprise!
I'm not used to receiving
Christmas presents. You have already
given me such lots of things--
everything I have, you know--that I don't
quite feel that I
deserve extras. But I like them just the
same. Do you want to know
what I bought with my money?
I. A silver watch in a leather case to
wear on my wrist and get me
to recitations in time.
II. Matthew Arnold's poems.
III. A hot water bottle.
IV. A steamer rug. (My tower is cold.)
V. Five hundred sheets of yellow
manuscript paper. (I'm going
to commence being an author pretty soon.)
VI. A dictionary of synonyms. (To enlarge
the author's vocabulary.)
VII. (I don't much like to confess this
last item, but I will.)
A pair of silk stockings.
And now, Daddy, never say I don't tell
all!
It was a very low motive, if you must
know it, that prompted the
silk stockings. Julia Pendleton comes
into my room to do geometry,
and she sits cross-legged on the couch
and wears silk stockings
every night. But just wait--as soon as
she gets back from vacation
I shall go in and sit on her couch in my
silk stockings. You see,
Daddy, the miserable creature that I am
but at least I'm honest;
and you knew already, from my asylum
record, that I wasn't perfect,
didn't you?
To recapitulate (that's the way the
English instructor begins every
other sentence), I am very much obliged
for my seven presents.
I'm pretending to myself that they came
in a box from my family
in California. The watch is from father,
the rug from mother,
the hot water bottle from grandmother who
is always worrying for fear
I shall catch cold in this climate--and
the yellow paper from my
little brother Harry. My sister Isabel
gave me the silk stockings,
and Aunt Susan the Matthew Arnold poems;
Uncle Harry (little Harry is
named after him) gave me the dictionary.
He wanted to send chocolates,
but I insisted on synonyms.
You don't object, do you, to playing the
part of a composite family?
And now, shall I tell you about my
vacation, or are you only interested
in my education as such? I hope you
appreciate the delicate shade
of meaning in `as such'. It is the latest
addition to my vocabulary.
The girl from Texas is named Leonora
Fenton. (Almost as funny
as Jerusha, isn't it?) I like her, but
not so much as Sallie McBride;
I shall never like any one so much as
Sallie--except you. I must
always like you the best of all, because
you're my whole family
rolled into one. Leonora and I and two
Sophomores have walked 'cross
country every pleasant day and explored
the whole neighbourhood,
dressed in short skirts and knit jackets
and caps, and carrying shiny
sticks to whack things with. Once we
walked into town--four miles--
and stopped at a restaurant where the
college girls go for dinner.
Broiled lobster (35 cents), and for
dessert, buckwheat cakes and maple
syrup (15 cents). Nourishing and cheap.
It was such a lark! Especially for me,
because it was so awfully
different from the asylum--I feel like an
escaped convict every
time I leave the campus. Before I
thought, I started to tell
the others what an experience I was
having. The cat was almost
out of the bag when I grabbed it by its
tail and pulled it back.
It's awfully hard for me not to tell
everything I know. I'm a very
confiding soul by nature; if I didn't
have you to tell things to,
I'd burst.
We had a molasses candy pull last Friday
evening, given by the
house matron of Fergussen to the
left-behinds in the other halls.
There were twenty-two of us altogether,
Freshmen and Sophomores and
juniors and Seniors all united in
amicable accord. The kitchen is huge,
with copper pots and kettles hanging in
rows on the stone wall--
the littlest casserole among them about
the size of a wash boiler.
Four hundred girls live in Fergussen. The
chef, in a white cap
and apron, fetched out twenty-two other
white caps and aprons--
I can't imagine where he got so many--and
we all turned ourselves
into cooks.
It was great fun, though I have seen
better candy. When it was
finally finished, and ourselves and the
kitchen and the door-knobs
all thoroughly sticky, we organized a
procession and still in our
caps and aprons, each carrying a big fork
or spoon or frying pan,
we marched through the empty corridors to
the officers' parlour,
where half-a-dozen professors and
instructors were passing
a tranquil evening. We serenaded them
with college songs and
offered refreshments. They accepted
politely but dubiously.
We left them sucking chunks of molasses
candy, sticky and speechless.
So you see, Daddy, my education
progresses!
Don't you really think that I ought to be
an artist instead
of an author?
Vacation will be over in two days and I
shall be glad to see the
girls again. My tower is just a trifle
lonely; when nine people occupy
a house that was built for four hundred,
they do rattle around a bit.
Eleven pages--poor Daddy, you must be
tired! I meant this to be
just a short little thank-you note--but
when I get started I seem
to have a ready pen.
Goodbye, and thank you for thinking of
me--I should be perfectly
happy except for one little threatening
cloud on the horizon.
Examinations come in February.
Yours with love,
Judy
PS. Maybe it isn't proper to send love?
If it isn't, please excuse.
But I must love somebody and there's only
you and Mrs. Lippett
to choose between, so you see--you'll
HAVE to put up with it,
Daddy dear, because I can't love her.
