Should you mind, just for a little while, pretending you are my grandmother?  Sallie has one and Julia and Leonora each two, and they were all comparing them tonight.  I can’t think of anything I’d rather have; it’s such a respectable relationship.  So, if you really don’t object—­When I went into town yesterday, I saw the sweetest cap of Cluny lace trimmed with lavender ribbon.  I am going to make you a present of it on your eighty-third birthday.

! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !

That’s the clock in the chapel tower striking twelve.  I believe
I am sleepy after all. 
                           Good night, Granny. 
                             I love you dearly. 
                                               Judy

The Ides of March
Dear D.-L.-L.,

I am studying Latin prose composition.  I have been studying it.  I shall be studying it.  I shall be about to have been studying it.  My re-examination comes the 7th hour next Tuesday, and I am going to pass or bust. So you may expect to hear from me next, whole and happy and free from conditions, or in fragments.

I will write a respectable letter when it’s over.  Tonight I have
a pressing engagement with the Ablative Absolute. 
                   Yours—­in evident haste
                                           J. A.

26th March

Mr. D.-L.-L.  Smith,

Sir:  You never answer any questions; you never show the slightest interest in anything I do.  You are probably the horridest one of all those horrid Trustees, and the reason you are educating me is, not because you care a bit about me, but from a sense of Duty.

I don’t know a single thing about you.  I don’t even know your name.  It is very uninspiring writing to a Thing.  I haven’t a doubt but that you throw my letters into the waste-basket without reading them.  Hereafter I shall write only about work.

My re-examinations in Latin and geometry came last week.  I passed
them both and am now free from conditions. 
                       Yours truly,
                                   Jerusha Abbott

2nd April
Dear Daddy-Long-Legs,

I am a beast.

Please forget about that dreadful letter I sent you last week—­ I was feeling terribly lonely and miserable and sore-throaty the night I wrote.  I didn’t know it, but I was just sickening for tonsillitis and grippe and lots of things mixed.  I’m in the infirmary now, and have been here for six days; this is the first time they would let me sit up and have a pen and paper.  The head nurse is very bossy.  But I’ve been thinking about it all the time and I shan’t get well until you forgive me.

Here is a picture of the way I look, with a bandage tied around my head in rabbit’s ears.

Doesn’t that arouse your sympathy?  I am having sublingual gland swelling.  And I’ve been studying physiology all the year without ever hearing of sublingual glands.  How futile a thing is education!