Richard’s wife plays a good game of bridge, and we have already started a society for the winter. The report of your enormous pluck has reached the old Market Place, for Richard spoke of you in terms of the warmest admiration and esteem. At parting we both positively had tears in our eyes.
May I, without hurting you, give a hint? Please put on your silk dress, Magna. I shall have a new one made, I think, as quickly as possible. You see, this is to be a very important event in my life.
Embrace my boy for me, and remember what I said about his hands.
Elsie.
Dear Jeanne,
It is wrong of me to have been so lazy lately about writing. But I have had so much to do. I have, as a matter of fact, moved house. It happened in a twinkling. This habitation became to let through a death, and mine was taken by a young married couple.
Now I am living on the beach road so far out that I am hardly to be reckoned as belonging to Copenhagen. Can you guess why I have moved? Simply to be nearer the farm, so childish does one become with advancing age. Magna advised me strongly to come out altogether, but I am not inclined to do that. I am always and shall be a child of towns, though in the year that Kelly has been learning to be a farmer I have taken an almost incredible interest in cows, pigs, winter crops, and all the rest of it. My life is so full of richness and light, I have nearly more joy than I can bear, and no troubles at all.
Magna manages our “estate,” as she always calls it to please me, most admirably. And how well she understands the art of setting others to work!
My Kelly and her little Oluf are now, as they always have been, inseparable, and I believe that the blue-eyed little comrade exercises a most beneficent influence on Kelly. Magna told me one day that she had heard Oluf saying—the boy lay in a hay-cock and didn’t know that Magna was on the other side of it taking her after-dinner nap—“I have no father, for my father died ten years before I was born. But if you like to be my father, I shall be quite content to have no other.”