[Illustration: “Judy at Basket Ball”]
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.