“Dear and blessed Cousin Ned,
“I want to talk to you about eggs just as soon as possible. Will you please call me up at the very first oportunity you have after you get home and oblige
“your devoted Cousin Joanne.”
She showed the note to Winnie into whose eyes came a little twinkle of amusement. “Now what’s the matter?” asked Joanne in a resigned tone.
“You don’t spell opportunity with one p but with two, and Jo, dear, you do write the scan’lousest fist, so childish, as if you’d just passed beyond pot-hooks and loops.”
“Well,” began Joanne protestingly, “he’ll know what I mean and that’s the main thing, besides I don’t care. I have just begun, really, for I hate to write, and never have done more than I could help. My governesses never insisted upon my writing out things as they do here at school. Then, too, lots of clever people write atrociously.”
“That’s not the point, you blessed little goose. I’ll tell you something, make a confession, as it were. I used to feel just as you do till I had to write Miss Dodge a note, and when she saw how fearfully I muddled it she asked me what was the idea, and I answered much as you have done. Then she asked, ‘Don’t you want to write like a perfect lady?’ or words to that effect. That gave me a jog and I began to open my eyes. ‘You see,’ she said, ‘when you are older if you were obliged to write to a stranger and he or she were to see such writing and such spelling you would be set down as a perfect ignoramus.’ Well, so you see that wasn’t exactly my ambition and I went to it with a vim and now, if I do say it, I am rather proud of my secretarial powers.”
Joanne shook her head dubiously. “I’ll never come to that pass, I know.”
“Maybe not, but you can at least improve on a mess like this.” Winnie gave a contemptuous flip to the note on Joanne’s desk.
“Oh, dear, Winnie, you are so brutally frank.”