Make it a point to re-read the letter you are about to answer, and take pains to reply to any questions your correspondent may have asked.  Nothing is more maddening than to make several important inquiries and find them wholly ignored while your friend tells you how busy she is, how many engagements she has in the future, how tired she is, and prefaces these uninteresting details with a long apology for her silence.  Who was it said “An apology is a mistaken explanation”?

Postal cards are not considered in correspondence.  They are to be used only for business, or where one is traveling and wishes to inform her friends of her whereabouts.  The picture or souvenir postals are largely used for this purpose.  But the postal card, in correspondence, is like a call when the lady is out and you do not leave your card—­it doesn’t count.

In regard to love-letters, bear in mind what Rousseau says: 

“To write a good love-letter you ought to begin without knowing what you mean to say, and finish without knowing what you have written.”  Then, having unbosomed yourself, don’t send it.

Care in Writing.—­It is well to remember, that once you have dropped a letter into the box, it is no longer yours.  It belongs to the person to whom it is addressed.  If you have been indiscreet, the matter is out of your hands.  Therefore, be careful what you write.  You cannot tell what use your correspondent may make of it.  Your friend may be trustworthy, but careless; some one may be dishonest enough to read it; it may be lost.  It is a good plan to write nothing you would not be willing to have read before a roomful of people who know that you wrote it.

[Manners and social customs 759]

Avoid personalities.  Don’t commit your unflattering opinions of other people to paper.  The letter is a witness whose veracity is unquestioned.

Don’t read your letters to others, unless they are family letters in which all may rightly have a share.  A letter is a private communication.

Keeping Letters.—­It is a bad plan to keep old letters, especially if they are of a personal nature, or if they contain confidences or secrets.  When the owner dies, there is no knowing to what use they may be put.  One regrets the publication of the private letters of great men and women, showing, as they so often do, the foolish, silly, conceited side of a character we have admired.  Private letters are often disillusioning, or betray the presence of the skeleton of the family, unhappiness or disgrace.

The safest way is to keep a letter till it is answered, then destroy it, This does away with a lot of useless lumber.