This was a sentence calculated to puzzle even parents intelligent as Judge and Mrs. Lomax imagined themselves.
Then the child turned over to her “free” sheet, on which she might write and spell as she pleased, and gazed at it wistfully.
Oh, to purr out her little heart upon it [p82] so that the mother so far away might hear her speaking, whispering, just as if she were cuddled up in the dear arms!
What a tragic thing this was in her hand, this red pen with the end sucked nearly white, so powerful, so powerless!
“I love you,” she wrote, and then covered a line or two with black crosses, that meant a passion of kisses. Oh, to catch at all the words that were surging in her heaving little breast, and to force them down on the white sheet, and to send them away red-hot across the sea!
She dipped wildly in the ink, she breathed hard and held the pen in almost a convulsive way. But the pitiful steel thing only spluttered, and left a few lines of black scribble. Could the mother understand that? Ah, perhaps, perhaps.
“I hop you are well, from Lynn.”
And so concluded the bi-weekly letter, with a big tear as usual, for Lynn simply could not write to mother without crying a little, though for the rest of the time she was a merry little grig.
Muffie was still blissfully untroubled by the need of orthography, and scribbled steadily over four pages, her lips moving all the time to such tune as “‘so we went down the gully and ferns, such a lot. And I got the best of all, and it’s under the house for you in a tin from [p83] Anna, and all of it’s for you in the bushhouse at our proper house and daddie.’”
After a time the Serenade began to get upon the nerves of all the room.