Daddy Long-Legs. Джин Уэбстер
sneezy cold?
I forgot to mail this yesterday so I will add an indignant postscript. We had a bishop this morning, and what do you think he said?
“The most beneficent promise made us in the Bible is this, ‘The poor ye have always with you.’ They were put here in order to keep us charitable.”
The poor, please observe, being a sort of useful domestic animal. If I had n’t grown into such a perfect lady, I should have gone up after service and told him what I thought.
Dear Daddy-Long-Legs,
I ’ve made the basket-ball team and you ought to see the bruise on my left shoulder. It ’s blue and mahogany with little streaks of orange. Julia Pendleton tried for the team, but she did n’t make it. Hooray!
You see what a mean disposition I have.
College gets nicer and nicer. I like the girls and the teachers and the classes and the campus and the things to eat. We have ice-cream twice a week and we never have corn-meal mush.
You only wanted to hear from me once a month, did n’t you? And I ’ve been peppering you with letters every few days! But I ’ve been so excited about all these new adventures that I must talk to somebody; and you ’re the only one I know. Please excuse my exuberance; I ’ll settle pretty soon. If my letters bore you, you can always toss them into the waste-basket. I promise not to write another till the middle of November.
Dear Daddy-Long-Legs,
Listen to what I ’ve learned to-day:
The area of the convex surface of the frustum of a regular pyramid is half the product of the sum of the perimeters of its bases by the altitude of either of its trapezoids.
It does n’t sound true, but it is—I can prove it!
You ’ve never heard about my clothes, have you, Daddy? Six dresses, all new and beautiful and bought for me—not handed down from somebody bigger. Perhaps you don’t realize what a climax that marks in the career of an orphan? You gave them to me, and I am very, very, very much obliged. It ’s a fine thing to be educated—but nothing compared to the dizzying experience of owning six new dresses. Miss Pritchard who is on the visiting committee picked them out—not Mrs. Lippett, thank goodness. I have an evening dress, pink mull over silk (I ’m perfectly beautiful in that), and a blue church dress, and a dinner dress of red veiling with Oriental trimming (makes me look like a Gipsy) and another of rose-colored challis, and a gray street suit, and an every-day dress for classes. That would n’t be an awfully big wardrobe for Julia Rutledge Pendleton, perhaps, but for Jerusha Abbott—Oh, my!
I suppose you ’re thinking now what a frivolous, shallow, little beast she is, and what a waste of money to educate a girl?
But Daddy, if you ’d been dressed in checked ginghams all your life, you ’d appreciate how I feel. And when I started to the high school, I entered upon another period even worse than the checked ginghams.
The poor box.
You can’t know how I dreaded appearing in school in those miserable poor-box dresses. I was perfectly sure to be put down in class next to the girl who first owned my dress, and she would whisper and giggle and point it out to the others. The bitterness of wearing your enemies’ cast-off clothes eats into your soul. If I wore silk stockings for the rest of my life, I don’t believe I could obliterate the scar.
At the fourth watch on Thursday the 13th of November, Hannibal routed the advance guard of the Romans and led the Carthaginian forces over the mountains into the plains of Casilinum. A cohort of light armed Numidians engaged the infantry of Quintus Fabius Maximus. Two battles and light skirmishing. Romans repulsed with heavy losses.
P. S. I know I ’m not to expect any letters in return, and I ’ve been warned not to bother you with questions, but tell me, Daddy, just this once—are you awfully old or just a little old? And are you perfectly bald or just a little bald? It is very difficult thinking about you in the abstract like a theorem in geometry.
Given a tall rich man who hates girls, but is very generous to one quite impertinent girl, what does he look like?
R.S.V.P.
Dear Daddy-Long-Legs,
You never answered my question and it was very important.
ARE YOU BALD?
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 gray 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 color your eyes are? They ’re gray, 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.)
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 would n’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 did n’t know that Henry the Eighth was married more than once or that Shelley was a poet. I did n’t know that people used to be monkeys and that the Garden of Eden was a beautiful myth. I did n’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 is n’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 was n’t brought up on “Little Women.” I have n’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.)
Sir,
I have the honor to report fresh explorations in the field of geometry. On Friday last we abandoned our former works in parallelopipeds and proceeded to truncated prisms. We are finding the road rough and very uphill.
The