Dear Enemy [37]
the plateau on which they stand to the cornfield below. The Indians have resumed savage life, and their chief is back at his post.
The doctor and I have been giving Loretta Higgins's nerves our most careful consideration. We think that this barrack life, with its constant movement and stir, is too exciting, and we have decided that the best plan will be to board her out in a private family, where she will receive a great deal of individual attention.
The doctor, with his usual resourcefulness, has produced the family. They live next door to him and are very nice people; I have just returned from calling. The husband is foreman of the casting room at the iron works, and the wife is a comfortable soul who shakes all over when she laughs. They live mostly in their kitchen in order to keep the parlor neat; but it is such a cheerful kitchen that I should like to live in it myself. She has potted begonias in the window and a nice purry tiger cat asleep on a braided rug in front of the stove. She bakes on Saturday--cookies and gingerbread and doughnuts. I am planning to pay my weekly call upon Loretta every Saturday morning at eleven o'clock. Apparently I made as favorable an impression on Mrs. Wilson as she made on me. After I had gone, she confided to the doctor that she liked me because I was just as common as she was.
Loretta is to learn housework and have a little garden of her own, and particularly play out of doors in the sunshine. She is to go to bed early and be fed up on nice nourishing food, and they are to pet her and make her happy. All this for three dollars a week!
Why not find a hundred such families, and board out all the children? Then this building could be turned into an idiot asylum, and I, not knowing anything about idiots, could conscientiously resign and go back home and live happily ever after.
Really, Judy, I am growing frightened. This asylum will get me if I stay long enough. I am becoming so interested in it that I can't think or talk or dream of anything else. You and Jervis have blasted all my prospects in life.
Suppose I should retire and marry and have a family. As families go nowadays, I couldn't hope for more than five or six children at the most, and all with the same heredity. But, mercy! such a family appears perfectly insignificant and monotonous. You have institutionalized me.
Reproachfully yours,
SALLIE McBRIDE.
P.S. We have a child here whose father was lynched. Isn't that a piquant detail to have in one's history?
Tuesday. Dearest Judy:
What shall we do? Mamie Prout does not like prunes. This antipathy to a cheap and healthful foodstuff is nothing but imagination, and ought not to be countenanced among the inmates of a well-managed institution. Mamie must be made to like prunes. So says our grammar teacher, who spends the noonday hour with us and overlooks the morals of our charges. About one o'clock today she marched Mamie to my office charged with the offense of refusing, ABSOLUTELY refusing, to open her mouth and put in a prune. The child was plumped down on a stool to await punishment from me.
Now, as you know, I do not like bananas, and I should hate awfully to be forced to swallow them; so, by the same token, why should I force Mamie Prout to swallow prunes?
While I was pondering a course that would seem to uphold Miss Keller's authority, but would at the same time leave a loophole for Mamie, I was called to the telephone.
"Sit there until I come back," I said, and went out and closed the door.
The message was from a kind lady wishing to motor me to a committee meeting. I didn't tell you that I am organizing local interest in our behalf. The idle rich who possess estates in this neighborhood are beginning to drift out from town, and I am laying my plans to catch them before they are deflected by too many garden parties and tennis tournaments. They have never been of the slightest use
The doctor and I have been giving Loretta Higgins's nerves our most careful consideration. We think that this barrack life, with its constant movement and stir, is too exciting, and we have decided that the best plan will be to board her out in a private family, where she will receive a great deal of individual attention.
The doctor, with his usual resourcefulness, has produced the family. They live next door to him and are very nice people; I have just returned from calling. The husband is foreman of the casting room at the iron works, and the wife is a comfortable soul who shakes all over when she laughs. They live mostly in their kitchen in order to keep the parlor neat; but it is such a cheerful kitchen that I should like to live in it myself. She has potted begonias in the window and a nice purry tiger cat asleep on a braided rug in front of the stove. She bakes on Saturday--cookies and gingerbread and doughnuts. I am planning to pay my weekly call upon Loretta every Saturday morning at eleven o'clock. Apparently I made as favorable an impression on Mrs. Wilson as she made on me. After I had gone, she confided to the doctor that she liked me because I was just as common as she was.
Loretta is to learn housework and have a little garden of her own, and particularly play out of doors in the sunshine. She is to go to bed early and be fed up on nice nourishing food, and they are to pet her and make her happy. All this for three dollars a week!
Why not find a hundred such families, and board out all the children? Then this building could be turned into an idiot asylum, and I, not knowing anything about idiots, could conscientiously resign and go back home and live happily ever after.
Really, Judy, I am growing frightened. This asylum will get me if I stay long enough. I am becoming so interested in it that I can't think or talk or dream of anything else. You and Jervis have blasted all my prospects in life.
Suppose I should retire and marry and have a family. As families go nowadays, I couldn't hope for more than five or six children at the most, and all with the same heredity. But, mercy! such a family appears perfectly insignificant and monotonous. You have institutionalized me.
Reproachfully yours,
SALLIE McBRIDE.
P.S. We have a child here whose father was lynched. Isn't that a piquant detail to have in one's history?
Tuesday. Dearest Judy:
What shall we do? Mamie Prout does not like prunes. This antipathy to a cheap and healthful foodstuff is nothing but imagination, and ought not to be countenanced among the inmates of a well-managed institution. Mamie must be made to like prunes. So says our grammar teacher, who spends the noonday hour with us and overlooks the morals of our charges. About one o'clock today she marched Mamie to my office charged with the offense of refusing, ABSOLUTELY refusing, to open her mouth and put in a prune. The child was plumped down on a stool to await punishment from me.
Now, as you know, I do not like bananas, and I should hate awfully to be forced to swallow them; so, by the same token, why should I force Mamie Prout to swallow prunes?
While I was pondering a course that would seem to uphold Miss Keller's authority, but would at the same time leave a loophole for Mamie, I was called to the telephone.
"Sit there until I come back," I said, and went out and closed the door.
The message was from a kind lady wishing to motor me to a committee meeting. I didn't tell you that I am organizing local interest in our behalf. The idle rich who possess estates in this neighborhood are beginning to drift out from town, and I am laying my plans to catch them before they are deflected by too many garden parties and tennis tournaments. They have never been of the slightest use