The unusual artistic ability which I exhibit, was developed at an early age through drawing chalk pictures of Mrs. Lippett on the woodshed door.
I hope that I don’t hurt your feelings when I criticize the home of my youth? But you have the upper hand, you know, for if I become too impertinent, you can always stop payment on your checks. That is n’t a very polite thing to say—but you can’t expect me to have any manners; a foundling asylum is n’t a young ladies’ finishing school.
You know, Daddy, it is n’t the work that is going to be hard in college. It ’s the play. Half the time I don’t know what the girls are talking about; their jokes seem to relate to a past that every one but me has shared. I ’m a foreigner in the world and I don’t understand the language. It ’s a miserable feeling. I ’ve had it all my life. At the high school the girls would stand in groups and just look at me. I was queer and different and everybody knew it. I could feel “John Grier Home” written on my face. And then a few charitable ones would make a point of coming up and saying something polite. I hated every one of them—the charitable ones most of all.
Nobody here knows that I was brought up in an asylum. I told Sallie McBride that my mother and father were dead, and that a kind old gentleman was sending me to college—which is entirely true so far as it goes. I don’t want you to think I am a coward, but I do want to be like the other girls, and that Dreadful Home looming over my childhood is the one great big difference. If I can turn my back on that and shut out the remembrance, I think I might be just as desirable as any other girl. I don’t believe there ’s any real, underneath difference, do you?
Anyway, Sallie McBride likes me!
Yours ever,
Judy Abbott.
(Née Jerusha.)
Saturday morning.