She did not seem to know what to say; one wonders why she wrote; indeed, half of the letter would be announcements of why she could not write. And the spelling! For a young lady who spoke and read fluently in four languages, that spelling was inexplicable.
Once Blynn sent back a letter with all the misspelled words underscored in red ink, and with the fatherly suggestion that she look them up and send him a re-written copy.
Her answer was a shocker; every word was purposely put out of gear.
“Deer Proffessorr,” it ran. “Eye kannott korresspponndd eney longerr wwithh U.
“Wun: U R 2 smarrt,
“Too: Ewer minde iz teecher-krazy an kant C anything butt lettres an semi-coalons.
“Thre: Eye kan beet U left handed inn tennes
“Ewers,
“Goargass.”
But she tried. Evidence was abundant enough. All suspicious words were left either totally blank or half-begun, to be finished out laboriously later via a small dictionary. The dictionary was not always employed immediately—her letters were regularly written at the sleepiest hour of the night; so that Blynn had the greatest joy in seeing dozens of hard words, like “disappoint” and “necessary,” flaring at him in two different kinds of ink, black for the first half and pale blue for the tails. His prize-letter—which he did not dare twit her about, for fear the supply would suddenly cease—was a mysterious thing, full of beginnings and no tails at all! Evidently sleep had overtaken the dictionary benediction.
In their correspondence during the first college terms at Holden, while she was growing from sixteen to almost eighteen, there was hardly a personal note struck. One would not suspect that they had ever been acquainted. Hers resembled school exercises more than anything else, full of incoherent announcements of local news. His, on the other hand, were short stories of Holden life; gathered together they might have been published as the personal impressions of Professor Blynn on the manners and customs of Holdonians. They were brisk, sprightly narratives, rather longish, for he dictated them to a by-the-hour stenographer, but rich in personal flavor and really interesting. The Levering family read them in turn as they might have passed on the numbers of a serial story.