My dear Gordon:
This is not a letter,--I don't owe you one,--it's a receipt for
sixty-five pairs of roller skates.
Many thanks.
S. McB.
Friday.
Dear Enemy:
I hear that I missed a call today, but Jane delivered your message,
together with the "Genetic Philosophy of Education." She says that
you will call in a few days for my opinion of the book. Is it to be a
written or an oral examination?
And doesn't it ever occur to you that this education business is rather
one-sided? It often strikes me that Dr. Robin MacRae's mental attitude
would also be the better for some slight refurbishing. I will promise to
read your book, provided you read one of mine. I am sending herewith the
"Dolly Dialogues," and shall ask for an opinion in a day or so.
It's uphill work making a Scotch Presbyterian frivolous, but persistency
accomplishes wonders.
S. McB.
May 12. My dear, dear Judy:
Talk about floods in Ohio! Right here in Dutchess County we are the
consistency of a wet sponge. Rain for five days, and everything wrong
with this institution.
The babies have had croup, and we have been up o' nights with them. Cook
has given notice, and there's a dead rat in the walls. Our three camps
leaked, and in the early dawn, after the first cloudburst, twenty-four
bedraggled little Indians, wrapped in damp bedding, came shivering to
the door and begged for admission. Since then every clothesline, every
stair-railing has been covered with wet and smelly blankets that steam,
but won't dry. Mr. Percy de Forest Witherspoon has returned to the hotel
to wait until the sun comes out.
After being cooped up for four days with no exercise to speak of, the
children's badness is breaking out in red spots, like the measles. Betsy
and I have thought of every form of active and innocent occupation that
could be carried on in such a congested quarter as this: blind man's
buff and pillow fights and hide-and-go-seek, gymnastics in the dining
room, and bean-bags in the school room. (We broke two windows.) The boys
played leapfrog up and down the hall, and jarred all the plaster in the
building. We have cleaned energetically and furiously. All the woodwork
has been washed, and all of the floors polished. But despite everything,
we have a great deal of energy left, and we are getting to that point of
nerves where we want to punch one another.
Sadie Kate has been acting like a little deil--do they have feminine
deils? If not, Sadie Kate has originated the species. And this afternoon
Loretta Higgins had--well, I don't know whether it was a sort of fit or
just a temper. She lay down on the floor and howled for a solid hour,
and when any one tried to approach her, she thrashed about like a little
windmill and bit and kicked.
By the time the doctor came she had pretty well worn herself out.
He picked her up, limp and drooping, and carried her to a cot in the
hospital room; and after she was asleep he came down to my library and
asked to look at the archives.
Loretta is thirteen; in the three years she has been here she has had
five of these outbreaks, and has been punished good and hard for them.
The child's ancestral record is simple: "Mother died of alcoholic
dementia, Bloomingdale Asylum. Father unknown."
He studied the page long and frowningly and shook his head.
"With a heredity like that, is it right to punish the child for having a
shattered nervous system?"
"It is not," said I, firmly. "We will mend her shattered nervous
system."
"If we can."
"We'll feed her up on cod-liver oil and sunshine, and find a nice kind
foster mother who will take pity on the poor little--"
But then my voice trailed off into nothing as I pictured Loretta's face,
with her hollow eyes and big nose and open mouth and no chin and stringy
hair and sticking-out ears. No foster mother in the world would love a
child who looked like that.
"Why, oh, why," I wailed, "doesn't the good Lord send orphan children
with blue eyes and curly hair and loving dispositions? I could place a
million of that sort in kind homes, but no one wants Loretta."
"I'm afraid the good Lord doesn't have anything to do with bringing our
Lorettas into the world. It is the devil who attends to them."
Poor Sandy! He gets awfully pessimistic about the future of the
universe; but I don't wonder, with such a cheerless life as he leads. He
looked today as though his own nervous system was shattered. He had been
splashing about in the rain since five this morning, when he was called
to a sick baby case. I made him sit down and have some tea, and we had a
nice, cheerful talk on drunkenness and idiocy and epilepsy and insanity.
He dislikes alcoholic parents, but he ties himself into a knot over
insane parents.
Privately, I don't believe there's one thing in heredity, provided you
snatch the babies away before their eyes are opened.
We've got the sunniest youngster here you ever saw; his mother and
Aunt Ruth and Uncle Silas all died insane, but he is as placid and
unexcitable as a cow.
Good-by, my dear. I am sorry this is not a more cheerful letter, though
at this moment nothing unpleasant seems to be happening. It's eleven
o'clock, and I have just stuck my head into the corridor, and all is
quiet except for two banging shutters and leaking eaves. I promised Jane
I would go to bed at ten. Good night, and joy be wi' ye baith!