“Stone Gate,”
Worcester, Mass.,
December 31st.
Dear Daddy-Long-Legs,
I meant to write to you before and thank you for your Christmas check, but life in the McBride household is very absorbing, and I don’t seem able to find two consecutive minutes to spend at a desk.
I bought a new gown—one that I did n’t need, but just wanted. My Christmas present this year is from Daddy-Long-Legs; my family just sent love.
I ’ve been having the most beautiful vacation visiting Sallie. She lives in a big old-fashioned brick house with white trimmings set back from the street—exactly the kind of house that I used to look at so curiously when I was in the John Grier Home, and wonder what it could be like inside. I never expected to see with my own eyes—but here I am! Everything is so comfortable and restful and homelike; I walk from room to room and drink in the furnishings.
It is the most perfect house for children to be brought up in; with shadowy nooks for hide and seek, and open fireplaces for pop-corn, and an attic to romp in on rainy days, and slippery banisters with a comfortable flat knob at the bottom, and a great big sunny kitchen, and a nice fat, sunny cook who has lived in the family thirteen years and always saves out a piece of dough for the children to bake. Just the sight of such a house makes you want to be a child all over again.
And as for families! I never dreamed they could be so nice. Sallie has a father and mother and grandmother, and the sweetest three-year-old baby sister all over curls, and a medium-sized brother who always forgets to wipe his feet, and a big, good-looking brother named Jimmie, who is a junior at Princeton.
We have the jolliest times at the table—everybody laughs and jokes and talks at once, and we don’t have to say grace beforehand. It ’s a relief not having to thank Somebody for every mouthful you eat. (I dare say I ’m blasphemous; but you ’d be, too, if you ’d offered as much obligatory thanks as I have.)