Daddy-Long-Legs and Dear Enemy by Jean Webster

trimmed with lavender ribbons. 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.
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    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 reëxamination 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. To-night I have a pressing engagement with the Ablative Absolute.
    Yours—in evident haste,
    J. A.
    March 26th.
    Dear 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 reëxaminations in Latin and geometry came last week. I passed them both and am now free from conditions.
    Yours truly,
    JERUSHA ABBOTT.
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    April 2d.
    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 coming down with tonsilitis 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!

    I can’t write any more; I get sort of shaky when I sit up too long. Please forgive me for being impertinent and ungrateful. I was badly brought up.
    Yours with love,
    JUDY ABBOTT.
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    THE INFIRMARY.
April 4th.
    Dearest Daddy-Long-Legs,
    Yesterday evening just toward dark, when I was sitting up in bed looking out at the rain and feeling awfully bored with life in a great institution, the nurse appeared with a long white box addressed to me, and filled with the loveliest pink rosebuds. And much nicer still, it contained a card with a very polite message written in a funny little uphill back hand (but one which shows a great deal of character). Thank you, Daddy, a thousand times. Your flowers make the first real, true present I ever received in my life. If you want to know what a baby I am, I lay down and cried because I was so happy.
    Now that I am sure you read my letters, I’ll make them much more interesting, so they’ll be worth keeping in a safe with red tape around them—only please take out that dreadful one and burn it up. I’d hate to think that you ever read it over.
    Thank you for making a very sick, cross, miserable Freshman cheerful. Probably you have lots of loving family and friends, and you don’t know what it feels like to be alone. But I do.
    Good-by—I’ll promise never to be horrid again, because now I know you’re a real person; also I’ll promise never to bother you with more questions.
    Do you still hate girls?
    Yours forever,
JUDY.
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    8th hour, Monday.
    Dear Daddy-Long-Legs,
    I hope