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 on your checks. 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.
(NÉE JERUSHA.)
Saturday morning.
I’ve just been reading this letter over and it sounds pretty uncheerful. 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 mail 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.
October 25th.
Dear Daddy-Long-Legs,
I’ve made 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 make it. 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 waste-basket. I promise not to write another till the middle of November.
Yours most loquaciously,
JUDY ABBOTT.
November 15th.
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-colored challis, and a gray 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 check 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 honor of being,
Your special correspondent from the front
J. ABBOTT.
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 am stuck. I can’t decide whether you have white hair or black hair or sort of sprinkly gray 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 color your eyes are? They’re gray, 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.5 I didn’t know that Henry the Eighth6 was married more than once or that Shelley7 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 Stevenson8 or that George Eliot9 was a lady. I had never seen a picture of the “Mona Lisa”10 and (it’s true but you won’t believe it) I had nev
er heard of Sherlock Holmes.11
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 poems12 and “Vanity Fair”13 and Kipling’s “Plain Tales”14 and—don’t laugh—“Little Women.”15 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,16 I’ll know what she is talking about!
(Ten o’clock bell. This is a very interrupted letter.)
Saturday.
Sir,
I have the honor 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 cluttered 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!
Good-by, Daddy, I hope that you are feeling as happy as I 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 deduct the twenty-five cents out of my allowance.
Good-by till January—and a merry Christmas!
Toward 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-corn. It’s late afternoon—the sun is just setting (a cold yellow color) 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 on time.
II. Matthew Arnold’s poems.17
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 Isobel gave me the silk stockings, and Aunt Susan the Matthew Arnold poems; Uncle Harry (little Harry is named for 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 neighborhood, dressed in short skirts and knit jackets and caps, and carrying shinny 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. 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 doorknobs 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’ parlor 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.
Good-by, 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.
P.S. 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.
On the Eve.
Dear Daddy-Long-Legs,
You should see the way this college is study
ing! We’ve forgotten we ever had a vacation. Fifty-seven irregular verbs have I introduced to my brain in the past four days—I’m only hoping they’ll stay till after examinations.
Some of the girls sell their text-books when they’re through with them, but I intend to keep mine. Then after I’ve graduated I shall have my whole education in a row in the bookcase, and when I need to use any detail, I can turn to it without the slightest hesitation. So much easier and more accurate than trying to keep it in your head.
Julia Pendleton dropped in this evening to pay a social call, and stayed a solid hour. She got started on the subject of family, and I couldn’t switch her off. She wanted to know what my mother’s maiden name was—did you ever hear such an impertinent question to ask of a person from a foundling asylum? I didn’t have the courage to say I didn’t know, so I just miserably plumped on the first name I could think of, and that was Montgomery. Then she wanted to know whether I belonged to the Massachusetts Montgomerys or the Virginia Montgomerys.
Her mother was a Rutherford. The family came over in the ark, and were connected by marriage with Henry the VIII. On her father’s side they date back further than Adam. On the topmost branches of her family tree there’s a superior breed of monkeys, with very fine silky hair and extra long tails.
I meant to write you a nice, cheerful, entertaining letter tonight, but I’m too sleepy—and scared. The Freshman’s lot is not a happy one.
Yours, about to be examined,
JUDY ABBOTT.
Sunday.
Dearest Daddy-Long-Legs,
I have some awful, awful, awful news to tell you, but I won’t begin with it; I’ll try to get you in a good humor first.
Jerusha Abbott has commenced to be an author. A poem entitled, “From my Tower,” appears in the February Monthly—on the first page, which is a very great honor for a Freshman. My English instructor stopped me on the way out from chapel last night, and said it was a charming piece of work except for the sixth line, which had too many feet. I will send you a copy in case you care to read it.