Daddy-Long-Legs
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 sort of 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. Good-by.)
[Plate: JUDY AND THE ORPHANS AT JOHN GRIER HOME.]
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 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
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 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 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 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. 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 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