Again I make record, Louise, that my course with the Byrd family pride has conquered it, even if I did display symptoms of it myself by staying away from the cottage so long. I'm in a very queer position. I have not made everybody understand that I can't be a Girl Scout and I am a dishonored person in Byrdsville, with all sorts of distinctions offered me. But this scheme I have thought up to get the doctor here has made me hold my breath so that I can hardly write, and I can't worry over honors and medals and things. I will do it! I will! Good-night!
CHAPTER X
Some people are so afflicted with energy that their days are twenty-five and a half hours long. Mine are twenty-six just now. If it were not for the fact that several hours each day I am under the influence of Roxanne's repose, I suspect I would run down like a clock that has exhausted its mainspring. Mamie Sue says that Belle says Roxanne is shiftless, but Belle is unable to distinguish shiftlessness from noble composure under difficulties. I told Mamie Sue that it would be best for her to forget all that Belle has ever said to her; and she is trying.
Still, though I understand it perfectly, it is positively queer to hear Roxanne talk about what the great doctor is going to do for Lovelace Peyton's eyes, and they haven't done one thing about getting him here from Cincinnati. The Idol has gone back to the obscurity of the shed, and I suppose he is making up some plan about the doctor, while he is working with his furnaces and retorts and things, but he hasn't told one yet, and it is two whole days. I do hope and pray that my plan will succeed without his having to bother with a common thing like money.
I have had to go to school these two days and then I have to study medicine with Lovelace Peyton almost all of every afternoon, so I haven't much time; but I think by to-morrow night I will have told about a thousand dollars' worth of things about my father and I can send it all off to Cousin Gilmore Lewis. The time the butler in our North Shore cottage, summer before last, told the newspapers so many things about the way Father and his family lived, he got three hundred dollars for it; so it does seem that if his own daughter told almost a whole small book about Father it would be worth at least a thousand dollars to a big magazine that prints things about everything in the world.
I heard Cousin Gilmore tell Father last spring that it wouldn't be long before he got to him in his magazine, and I have two reasons for wanting to beat the one who is going to write Father up. One is that I need the money for Lovelace Peyton's eyes, and the other is that before all this comes out about Father and the stolen steel patent, I want to write about him like he might be, and ignore what the world may consider him. I want to tell about him like I feel toward him and not like I know people will think he is. If the weekly comes out every week, they ought to print what I say about a week from Saturday, and maybe it will take Judge Luttrell that long to get his prosecution ready. The Judge doesn't work much harder than others in Byrdsville, and I can trust him to be slow. Of course, I couldn't write a thousand dollars' worth of things about just Father himself, but I am telling all about Byrdsville, which is his present home, and how distinguished and beloved he is in it.
A lot I have written I have just copied down from you, Louise—who are a better friend than I knew when I bought you—such as the descriptions of the apple-trees and landscape and Father's charity to Mr. and Mrs. Satterwhite. It filled up two pages just to mention the things he gave them, and it was a page more when I told a few of the grateful things they said to me. I left myself out and had them say the things right to him. What his generosity in the matter of buying jewelry from Mr. Snider did for the seven children—with just three of the names mentioned, because I think Sally Geraldine, Judy Claudia, and Tom Roderick are interesting as names—made more than a page more.
I wrote until nearly twelve o'clock last night about the Byrds and their family history and how wonderful it is for Father to have made such friends as they are. I just described the Idol as he really is and told what a great inventor he is without dwelling on what he invented, because that will be published when Judge Luttrell gets out the injunction.
I mentioned Lovelace Peyton's accident in detail, because some day when he is a world-famous surgeon a good account of it will be valuable. That took up fourteen pages. I am going to send that kodak picture Tony took of Roxanne, with a good description of her to be printed under it.
Nobody could really give a good history of the Byrd cottage without at least a half dozen pages of Uncle Pompey and what he cooks. I am going to get the nutcake recipe and paste it on the margin. All women readers will like that if they try it once.