P. S. Would you be terribly displeased, Daddy, if I didn’t turn out
to be a Great Author after all, but just a Plain Girl?
6.30, Saturday.
_Dear Daddy_,
We started to walk to town to-day, but mercy! how it poured. I like
winter to be winter with snow instead of rain.
Julia’s desirable uncle called again this afternoon--and brought a
five-pound box of chocolates. There are advantages you see about
rooming with Julia.
Our innocent prattle appeared to amuse him and he waited over a
train in order to take tea in the study. And an awful lot of trouble
we had getting permission. It’s hard enough entertaining fathers
and grandfathers, but uncles are a step worse; and as for brothers
and cousins, they are next to impossible. Julia had to swear that he
was her uncle before a notary public and then have the county
clerk’s certificate attached. (Don’t I know a lot of law?) And even
then I doubt if we could have had our tea if the Dean had chanced to
see how youngish and good-looking Uncle Jervis is.
Anyway, we had it, with brown bread Swiss cheese sandwiches. He
helped make them and then ate four. I told him that I had spent last
summer at Lock Willow, and we had a beautiful gossipy time about the
Semples, and the horses and cows and chickens. All the horses that
he used to know are dead, except Grover, who was a baby colt at the
time of his last visit--and poor Grove now is so old he can just
limp about the pasture.
He asked if they still kept doughnuts in a yellow crock with a blue
plate over it on the bottom shelf of the pantry--and they do! He
wanted to know if there was still a woodchuck’s hole under the pile
of rocks in the night pasture--and there is! Amasai caught a big,
fat, gray one there this summer, the twenty-fifth great-grandson of
the one Master Jervie caught when he was a little boy.
I called him “Master Jervie” to his face, but he didn’t appear to
be insulted. Julia says that she has never seen him so amiable;
he’s usually pretty unapproachable. But Julia hasn’t a bit of
tact; and men, I find, require a great deal. They purr if you rub
them the right way and spit if you don’t. (That isn’t a very
elegant metaphor. I mean it figuratively.)
We’re reading Marie Bashkirtseff’s journal. Isn’t it amazing?
Listen to this: “Last night I was seized by a fit of despair that
found utterance in moans, and that finally drove me to throw the
dining-room clock into the sea.”
It makes me almost hope I’m not a genius; they must be very wearing
to have about--and awfully destructive to the furniture.
Mercy! how it keeps pouring. We shall have to swim to chapel
to-night.
Yours ever,