I know that this letter doesn't contain a word of the kind of news that you like to hear. But it's that beastly twilight hour of a damp November day, and I'm in a beastly uncheerful mood. I'm awfully afraid that I am developing into a temperamental person, and Heaven knows Gordon can supply all the temperament that one family needs! I don't know where we'll land if I don't preserve my sensibly stolid, cheerful nature.
Have you really decided to go South with Jervis? I appreciate your feeling (to a slight extent) about not wanting to be separated from a husband; but it does seem sort of hazardous to me to move so young a daughter to the tropics.
The children are playing blind man's buff in the lower corridor. I think I'll have a romp with them, and try to be in a more affable mood before resuming my pen.
A BIENTOT! SALLIE.
P.S. These November nights are pretty cold, and we are getting ready to move the camps indoors. Our Indians are very pampered young savages at present, with a double supply of blankets and hot-water bottles. I shall hate to see the camps go; they have done a lot for us. Our lads will be as tough as Canadian trappers when they come in.
November 20.
Dear Judy:
Your motherly solicitude is sweet, but I didn't mean what I said.
Of course it's perfectly safe to convey Judy, junior, to the temperately tropical lands that are washed by the Caribbean. She'll thrive as long as you don't set her absolutely on top of the equator. And your bungalow, shaded by palms and fanned by sea breezes, with an ice machine in the back yard and an English doctor across the bay, sounds made for the rearing of babies.
My objections were all due to the selfish fact that I and the John Grier are going to be lonely without you this winter. I really think it's entrancing to have a husband who engages in such picturesque pursuits as financing tropical railroads and developing asphalt lakes and rubber groves and mahogany forests. I wish that Gordon would take to life in those picturesque countries; I'd be more thrilled by the romantic possibilities of the future. Washington seems awfully commonplace compared with Honduras and Nicaragua and the islands of the Caribbean.