I have put off trying to make Whythe and Elizabeth see how stupid they are, and as Elizabeth hasn’t been very nice to me I haven’t felt it to be my duty to show her what a goose she is.  Neither have I told Whythe that almost any girl who adored him would do for his wife.  As I don’t adore I wouldn’t do, and I think he is beginning to take it in.  A dozen times of late he has told me he doesn’t understand me.  He does not.  And never will.

The thing in Jess’s letter which made me hot was this:  “What is the matter with you and Billy?  Pat says (Pat is Patricia, Billy’s sister) that you’ve been pretty horrid about writing him, and he’s been blue-black at not getting letters from you; but at present he is having a good time with a very jolly girl from the West who is at their hotel.  Chirp him something cheerful, Canary Bird.  If I were younger or Billy older you shouldn’t have him.  I’d have him myself.  I’m not going to stand for bad treatment of him, and if those Southern boys who make love to every pretty girl they see, and make it better than any boys on earth, have made you forget an old friend, I’m coming down and take you back home.  Behave yourself, Kitty Canary, and write Billy the sort of letter we scream over up here.”  And then she went on with other things.

It is ridiculous in Pat to say I haven’t written Billy!  I have.  Three long letters and three cards, and certainly he can’t expect more than that, as he hasn’t been gone but two months and five days; and, besides, friends ought to have such confidence in each other that they don’t need letters to prove their friendship.  Not a word have I had from him in more than two weeks, and if Jess thinks I am going to write him a chirp letter (which he won’t have time to read if he is going around so much with a Western girl and having so much fun) she, too, thinks Wrong.  That Westerner explains why I haven’t heard from him for so long.  It is outrageous in Billy to behave as he has been behaving.  All men are alike.  Every one of them.  It was ignorance in me to imagine Billy was different.  He isn’t.  The more I thought of how mistaken I had been in him the madder I got, and I just wrote a postscript to my letter and flew to the post-office with it.  It seemed providential that my letter was ready to send.  I hope he will read it while on one of his joyous excursions with the Western Woman, who is doubtless twenty-five, maybe thirty, and just making use of Billy, who hasn’t sense enough to see it.  I nearly cried my eyes out last night, before Miss Susanna came up to bed, because it was necessary to send him such a letter.  Still, Billy has to learn things in life and he might as well learn them early.  What I wrote was this: