I have it planned exactly what you look like--very
satisfactorily--until I reach the top of your head, and then I AM
stuck. I can't decide whether you have white hair or black hair or
sort of sprinkly grey hair or maybe none at all.
Here is your portrait:
But the problem is, shall I add some hair?
Would you like to know what colour your eyes are? They're grey, and
your eyebrows stick out like a porch roof (beetling, they're called in
novels), and your mouth is a straight line with a tendency to turn down
at the corners. Oh, you see, I know! You're a snappy old thing with a
temper.
(Chapel bell.)
9.45 p.m.
I have a new unbreakable rule: never, never to study at night no
matter how many written reviews are coming in the morning. Instead, I
read just plain books--I have to, you know, because there are eighteen
blank years behind me. You wouldn't believe, Daddy, what an abyss of
ignorance my mind is; I am just realizing the depths myself. The
things that most girls with a properly assorted family and a home and
friends and a library know by absorption, I have never heard of. For
example:
I never read Mother Goose or David Copperfield or Ivanhoe or Cinderella
or Blue Beard or Robinson Crusoe or Jane Eyre or Alice in Wonderland or
a word of Rudyard Kipling. I didn't know that Henry the Eighth was
married more than once or that Shelley was a poet. I didn't know that
people used to be monkeys and that the Garden of Eden was a beautiful
myth. I didn't know that R. L. S. stood for Robert Louis Stevenson or
that George Eliot was a lady. I had never seen a picture of the 'Mona
Lisa' and (it's true but you won't believe it) I had never heard of
Sherlock Holmes.
Now, I know all of these things and a lot of others besides, but you
can see how much I need to catch up. And oh, but it's fun! I look
forward all day to evening, and then I put an 'engaged' on the door and
get into my nice red bath robe and furry slippers and pile all the
cushions behind me on the couch, and light the brass student lamp at my
elbow, and read and read and read one book isn't enough. I have four
going at once. Just now, they're Tennyson's poems and Vanity Fair and
Kipling's Plain Tales and--don't laugh--Little Women. I find that I am
the only girl in college who wasn't brought up on Little Women. I
haven't told anybody though (that WOULD stamp me as queer). I just
quietly went and bought it with $1.12 of my last month's allowance; and
the next time somebody mentions pickled limes, I'll know what she is
talking about!
(Ten o'clock bell. This is a very interrupted letter.)