Yesterday’s mail brought a good long letter from father and about
fifteen Chicago papers. It simply was good to hear the doings in Chicago
and suburbs. I imagine there will be a stack of letters come in some of
these days. A letter came from my _marraine_ saying I must surely stay
with her while in Paris.
We have just been out in the field, but wind brought rain up from the
south and we returned. When we got back, the mail was in. Oh, golly!
Thirteen letters for _me_. It has been a pretty long wait, but they came
in a bunch. Letters ranging from September 2 to 12 arrived. My, but it’s
a pleasure to hear from father. Of course your letters are just as good,
but they come natural, as you have been always the official
correspondent, but father’s letters combine surprise with novelty, and
the newspaper clippings are so interesting. They appeal more than the
newspapers themselves, because they allow me to follow the interests of
my friends through my family. How they do marry off! It will be a
different country, a different town, even a changed family when I
return. I am not quite sure which is changing the faster—father or
Robert. Mother seems to remain the same. Being constantly in my own
company keeps me from seeing a change in myself. It is natural that
Robert should develop rapidly, but father has changed so greatly that I
can hardly keep pace with him. He seems to be entering a new youth from
the day he ran up the stairs at 1831 to put out the fire in your room
started by my little alcohol engine—I recall him as a silent, serious,
weary-with-work father, whose only real friends were in books and in his
office. He was nervous and particular, and never would tell me when he
was satisfied with what I tried to do—kind, patient, silent, oh, so
careful. I could not move him, win him, nor understand him. This was, of
course, after my curls were cut. After he had been my Santa Claus and
birthday godfather and Easter fairy in granting my every wish, then came
the high-school period when I would have given anything to have really
heard his approval, when I no longer feared him nor yet appreciated him.
At college I wished to be worthy of his name. There I learned something
of men—and, oh, how proud of him I was Junior Week! But from my
Christmas vacation there was a great change—the barrier was broken and I
began to see in him a future friend and companion, the equal of whom I
had not met among all my friends. Of course the change has been mostly
in me, and my growing point of view; but, still, father has grown
jollier and freer, more witty and talkative, and more intimate with
people and nature and animals. I have wondered at the causes: two,
anyway, were prosperity and Robert—God bless him and our happy home. To
the other, no legend, story, or orator ever succeeded in giving to it
its due; that single word more than godly, more than eternal, a title, a
prayer, a caress, guardian angel of the mind—_mother_!
Good night, dear family,