The Steppe Children
"Dear Buddy:" Elizabeth was writing, "dear, dear, dear, dear Buddy: Mother says I may write you real letters, now, all about everything, because you are in a condition to bear it. So I am starting in bright and early this morning to go into details about my existence here, and my rejoicings at your convalesence. (I spelled that right, I know. I am naturally a good speller, but I have such a poor example set by my brother the Harvard gradjuate, that I fall into bad ways at the slightest provocation.)
"First let me testify that I love you best—best—best in the world next to and including Father John and Mother Darby. You know that already, but if you are like me, the things you like to be told best are the things you know already. You know also already how I feel about your being sick. Please get better and come down here quick. I want you here, oh! so very, very much. Father and Mother thought I had better get the benifit of country air, but they don't know that I can't get much benifit from country air while you are breathing cloriform and bandige lint all the time. I am not as comfortable in my mind as I should be in stuffy New York, in the hotel with Mother and Father. I know you will suspect my motives in yearning for hotel life, but it is really you and Mother and Father I want more even than life at the Holland House. Of course, I can't help feeling that if the house in Jersey is going to be closed and the family moved into town, though even in the dead of summer, that I ought to be moved with it, instead of being shoved off down here.
"Buddy, I know you used to like it here, but I am miserable. I know you would think it was awful of me if you knew how I felt inside all the time, but I am not half-civilized or savage enough to like the primative way things are down here. I think girls are more sensitive and refined than boys and care what they eat more, and how things sound that are said to them.
"I suppose that sounds horrid. Grandmother thinks I am horrid, though she is very tactful, I will say;—but Grandfather teases me from morning till night, and has no respect for my years. I don't see why he thinks I am such a child. He was engaged to Grandmother when she was sixteen, and that is only two years and forty-one days older than I am. But oh! Buddy, I wish my other grandparents had lived. I think I am all Endicott, really, because I feel like a stranger in a strange land. Children and little girls keep coming to call on me. The girls of my own age that I used to play with keep their distance, and I am not sorry. It's hard enough to be polite as it is. Life is one eternal round of corn beef and cabbage and fried fish hash. I hope you get plenty of steaks and chops and delicacies. Grandmother won't let me go in bathing unless I have someone to go with, and I haven't any one to go with. The motors whizz by all day, but Grandfather's Ford is in the repair shop, and so I don't get anywhere. Tennis? All the boys own the courts around here, and won't let the girls on them for fear they will mess them up for the tournaments. I don't know any girls to play with, so that doesn't affect me, but you can see what a good time I am having.
"Well, 'a sorrow's crown of sorrow is remembering happier things.' We used to have good times together, Buddy, befo' de war.
"Your affectionate, but very blighted sister,
"Elizabeth—Eliza—Elspeth—Bess—Bessie—Lizzie—Betsy—Beth, etc."
As she folded the closely written sheets of lilac-tinted notepaper and crowded them into their envelope, her grandmother's voice summoned her to the head of the stairs.
"The step-children are here," was what she seemed to be saying; "shall I send them up or are you ready to come down?"
"I beg your pardon, Grandmother?"