(Chapel bell.)
9.45 P. M.
I have a new unbreakable rule: never, never to study at night no matter how many written reviews are coming in the morning. Instead, I read just plain books—I have to, you know, because there are eighteen blank years behind me. You would n’t believe, Daddy, what an abyss of ignorance my mind is; I am just realizing the depths myself. The things that most girls with a properly assorted family and a home and friends and a library know by absorption, I have never heard of. For example:
I never read “Mother Goose” or “David Copperfield” or “Ivanhoe” or “Cinderella” or “Blue Beard” or “Robinson Crusoe” or “Jane Eyre” or “Alice in Wonderland” or a word of Rudyard Kipling. I did n’t know that Henry the Eighth was married more than once or that Shelley was a poet. I did n’t know that people used to be monkeys and that the Garden of Eden was a beautiful myth. I did n’t know that R.L.S. stood for Robert Louis Stevenson or that George Eliot was a lady. I had never seen a picture of the “Mona Lisa” and (it ’s true but you won’t believe it) I had never heard of Sherlock Holmes.
Now, I know all of these things and a lot of others besides, but you can see how much I need to catch up. And oh, but it ’s fun! I look forward all day to evening, and then I put an “engaged” on the door and get into my nice red bath robe and furry slippers and pile all the cushions behind me on the couch and light the brass student lamp at my elbow, and read and read and read. One book is n’t enough. I have four going at once. Just now, they ’re Tennyson’s poems and “Vanity Fair” and Kipling’s “Plain Tales” and—don’t laugh—“Little Women.” I find that I am the only girl in college who was n’t brought up on “Little Women.” I have n’t told anybody though (that would stamp me as queer). I just quietly went and bought it with $1.12 of my last month’s allowance; and the next time somebody mentions pickled limes, I ’ll know what she is talking about!
(Ten o’clock bell. This is a very interrupted letter.)
Saturday.
Sir,
I have the honor to report fresh explorations in the field of geometry. On Friday last we abandoned our former works in parallelopipeds and proceeded to truncated prisms. We are finding the road rough and very uphill.
Sunday.