DEC 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 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.)

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.

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 a ‘don’t 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 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.

(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 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

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!

8.

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-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?

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?

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 across the country every pleasant day and explored the whole neighbourhood. 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 fun! Especially for me, because it was so awfully different from the asylum.

Vacation will be over in two days and I shall be glad to see the girls again. My tower is just a little lonely.

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

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.

9.