If the writers of all such letters would merely read over what they have written, and ask themselves if they could find pleasure in receiving messages of like manner and matter, perhaps they might begin to do a little thinking, and break the habit of cataleptic unthinkingness that seemingly descends upon them as soon as they are seated at their desk.

=THE BLANK=

The writer of the “blank” letter begins fluently with the date and “Dear Mary,” and then sits and chews his penholder or makes little dots and squares and circles on the blotter-utterly unable to attack the cold, forbidding blankness of that first page.  Mentally, he seems to say:  “Well, here I am—­and now what?” He has not an idea!  He can never find anything of sufficient importance to write about.  A murder next door, a house burned to the ground, a burglary or an elopement could alone furnish material; and that, too, would be finished off in a brief sentence stating the bare fact.

A person whose life is a revolving wheel of routine may have really very little to say, but a letter does not have to be long to be welcome—­it can be very good indeed if it has a message that seems to have been spoken.

    Dear Lucy: 

“Life here is as dull as ever—­duller if anything.  Just the same old things done in the same old way—­not even a fire engine out or a new face in town, but this is to show you that I am thinking of you and longing to hear from you.”

Or: 
    “I wish something really exciting would happen so that I might have
    something with a little thrill in it to write you, but everything goes
    on and on—­if there were any check in its sameness, I think we’d all
    land in a heap against the edge of the town.”

=THE MEANDERING LETTER=

As its name implies, the meandering letter is one which dawdles through disconnected subjects, like a trolley car gone down grade off the track, through fences and fields and flower-beds indiscriminately.  “Mrs. Blake’s cow died last week, the Governor and his wife were on the Reception Committee; Mary Selfridge went to stay with her aunt in Riverview; I think the new shade called Harding blue is perfectly hideous.”

Another that is almost akin to it, runs glibly on, page after page of meaningless repetition and detail.  “I thought at first that I would get a gray dress—­I think gray is such a pretty color, and I have had so many blue dresses.  I can’t decide this time whether to get blue or gray.  Sometimes I think gray is more becoming to me than blue.  I think gray looks well on fair-haired people—­I don’t know whether you would call my hair fair or not?  I am certainly not dark, and yet fair hair suggests a sort of straw color.  Maybe I might be called medium fair.  Do you think I am light enough to wear gray?  Maybe blue would be more serviceable.  Gray certainly looks pretty in the spring, it is so clean and fresh looking.  There is a lovely French model at Benson’s in gray, but I can have it copied for less in blue.  Maybe it won’t be as pretty though as the gray,” etc., etc.  By the above method of cud-chewing, any subject, clothes, painting the house, children’s school, planting a garden, or even the weather, need be limited only by the supply of paper and ink.