Here’s a four-leaf clover from Camp McBride to bring you good luck
for the New Year.
January 9th.
Do you wish to do something, Daddy, that will insure your eternal
salvation? There is a family here who are in awfully desperate
straits. A mother and father and four visible children--the two
older boys have disappeared into the world to make their fortune and
have not sent any of it back. The father worked in a glass factory
and got consumption--it’s awfully unhealthy work--and now has been
sent away to a hospital. That took all of their savings, and the
support of the family falls upon the oldest daughter who is
twenty-four. She dressmakes for $1.50 a day (when she can get it)
and embroiders centerpieces in the evening. The mother isn’t very
strong and is extremely ineffectual and pious. She sits with her
hands folded, a picture of patient resignation, while the daughter
kills herself with overwork and responsibility and worry; she
doesn’t see how they are going to get through the rest of the
winter--and I don’t either. One hundred dollars would buy some coal
and some shoes for the three children so that they could go to
school, and give a little margin so that she needn’t worry herself
to death when a few days pass and she doesn’t get work.
You are the richest man I know. Don’t you suppose you could spare
one hundred dollars? That girl deserves help a lot more than I ever
did. I wouldn’t ask it except for the girl; I don’t care much what
happens to the mother--she is such a jelly-fish.
The way people are forever rolling their eyes to heaven and saying,
“Perhaps it’s all for the best,” when they are perfectly dead sure
it’s not, makes me enraged. Humility or resignation or whatever you
choose to call it, is simply impotent inertia. I’m for a more
militant religion!
We are getting the most dreadful lessons in philosophy--all of
Schopenhauer for to-morrow. The professor doesn’t seem to realize
that we are taking any other subject. He’s a queer old duck; he
goes about with his head in the clouds and blinks dazedly when
occasionally he strikes solid earth. He tries to lighten his
lectures with an occasional witticism--and we do our best to smile,
but I assure you his jokes are no laughing matter. He spends his
entire time between classes in trying to figure out whether matter
really exists or whether he only thinks it exists.
I’m sure my sewing girl hasn’t any doubt but that it exists!
Where do you think my new novel is? In the waste basket. I can see
myself that it’s no good on earth, and when a loving author
realizes that, what _would_ be the judgment of a critical public?
Later.
I address you, Daddy, from a bed of pain. For two days I’ve been
laid up with swollen tonsils; I can just swallow hot milk, and that
is all. “What were your parents thinking of not to have those
tonsils out when you were a baby?” the doctor wished to know. I’m
sure I haven’t an idea, but I doubt if they were thinking much
about me.
Yours,