Father dear, will you please send me five hundred dollars, and if you can do it by return mail I will be very much obliged.  The person I want part of it for is so tired that she might not be able to ever get rested unless she has a chance pretty quick to lie down and do nothing for a month, anyhow, and that is why I am in a hurry.  Tiredness is a very wearing disease and if it runs on too long it runs a person into a state that is almost impossible to get out of, and the whole family has to pay up for letting it go on.  Home gets hell-y when there’s too much tiredness in it.  What I want the money for is this:  Mrs. Stafford is worn out.  You know her.  She was Miss Mary Shirley, and married a perfectly useless man when she was eighteen, and she is now the mother of seven children, and has a mother-in-law living with her, and also Miss Lou Barbee, who won’t go away.  And, of course, the man whom she can’t turn out.  He isn’t bad.  Just lazy, with nothing to him, but she loves him and I will skip over that part.  She needs a rest and ought to have it.  It’s nothing but scrimp and scrape and strive to keep up appearances day in and day out, year in and year out, until she is all to pieces and the children don’t realize what is the matter.  And, of course, the Male Person doesn’t, for he says that Woman’s Place is in the Home.  When he told me that yesterday (his heels were on the railing of his porch, where he generally keeps them, and his pipe in his mouth) I thought to myself that if he were mine he would have to get out of my home or prove he had a better right to share it with me than he had ever proved to his wife.  But I won’t get on that, either.  I’ll go back to Mrs. Stafford.

Half the time she doesn’t have a servant, and all the time she has a mother-in-law, who is pie crust, and Miss Lou Barbee, who’s a bagpipe, and with the doors locked and windows shut so no one can see, she has worked herself to death.  What I want done is to have an invitation sent her from an old friend to be the guest of the hospital here for a month, and you will be the friend and she will never know it.  Miss Polk, the superintendent of the hospital, will manage things.  I’ve talked it over with her, and she understands.  Miss Polk is a perfectly grand person.  For Simon-pure sense there isn’t her equal on earth.  She and I have decided on what we would do if we had money.  We’d have a Fund for Tired Mothers and Fathers.  It would be used to give them a Rest before Death.

I hope you won’t mind sending the money.  I don’t think you will, for everybody says business is so prosperous it’s actually unrighteous, and it’s in the Bible that you ought to put your treasures where you can find them again, or something like that.  If you can’t send it I know there will be a good reason for your not sending it, but I would like to have it by Monday if possible, so Mrs. Stafford can go to the Hospital the next day.  Later, four other people can have their turn.  It is to be used not for illness, but for Tiredness; for broken-downers and worn-outers who need being waited on and fed up and allowed to keep still.  Miss Polk and I are going to decide on who needs a rest the most before I go away, and I send you for it, Father dear, an armful of squeezes and the biggest bunch of kisses the mail-man can take.