Free Daddy-Long-Legs and Dear Enemy by Jean Webster Page B

the rooms in an octagon house? Some of the girls insist that they’re square; but I think they’d have to be shaped like a piece of pie. Don’t you?
    2nd. Suppose there were a great big hollow sphere made of looking-glass and you were sitting inside. Where would it stop reflecting your face and begin reflecting your back? The more one thinks about this problem, the more puzzling it becomes. You can see with what deep philosophical reflection we engage our leisure!
    Did I ever tell you about the election? It happened three weeks ago, but so fast do we live, that three weeks is ancient history. Sallie was elected, and we had a torchlight parade with transparencies saying, “McBride Forever,” and a band consisting of fourteen pieces (three mouth organs and eleven combs).
    We’re very important persons now in “258.” Julia and I come in for a great deal of reflected glory. It’s quite a social strain to be living in the same house with a president.
    Bonne nuit, cher Daddy.
    Acceptez mes compliments,
Très respectueux.
Je suis,
Votre JUDY.

    November 12th.
    Dear Daddy-Long-Legs,
    We beat the Freshmen at basket ball yesterday. Of course we’re pleased—but oh, if we could only beat the Juniors! I’d be willing to be black and blue all over and stay in bed a week in a witch-hazel compress.
    Sallie has invited me to spend the Christmas vacation with her. She lives in Worcester, Massachusetts. Wasn’t it nice of her? I shall love to go. I’ve never been in a private family in my life, except at Lock Willow, and the Semples were grown-up and old and don’t count. But the McBrides have a houseful of children (anyway two or three) and a mother and father and grandmother, and an Angora cat. It’s a perfectly complete family! Packing your trunk and going away is more fun than staying behind. I am terribly excited at the prospect.
    Seventh hour—I must run to rehearsal. I’m to be in the Thanksgiving theatricals. A prince in a tower with a velvet tunic and yellow curls. Isn’t that a lark?
    Yours,
J. A.
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    Saturday.
    Do you want to know what I look like? Here’s a photograph of all three that Leonora Fenton took.
    The light one who is laughing is Sallie, and the tall one with her nose in the air is Julia, and the little one with the hair blowing across her face is Judy—she is really more beautiful than that, but the sun was in her eyes.
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    â€œSTONE GATE,”
WORCESTER, MASS.,
December 31st.
    Dear Daddy-Long-Legs,
    I meant to write to you before and thank you for your Christmas check, but life in the McBride household is very absorbing, and I don’t seem able to find two consecutive minutes to spend at a desk.
    I bought a new gown—one that I didn’t need, but just wanted. My Christmas present this year is from Daddy-LongLegs; my family just sent love.
    I’ve been having the most beautiful vacation visiting Sallie. She lives in a big old-fashioned brick house with white trimmings set back from the street—exactly the kind of house that I used to look at so curiously when I was in the John Grier Home, and wonder what it could be like inside. I never expected to see with my own eyes—but here I am! Everything is so comfortable and restful and homelike; I walk from room to room and drink in the furnishings.
    It is the most perfect house for children to be brought up in; with shadowy nooks for hide and seek, and open fireplaces for pop-corn, and an attic to romp in on rainy days, and slippery banisters with a comfortable flat knob at the bottom, and a great big sunny kitchen, and a nice fat, sunny cook who has lived in the family thirteen years and always saves out a piece of dough for the children to bake. Just the sight of such a house makes you want to be a child all over again.
    And as for families! I never dreamed they could be so nice. Sallie has a father and mother and grandmother, and the