Calls on the sick should be made with the greatest discretion. One should ascertain in the first place whether or not one’s friend will really be equal to seeing one, and then stay for a few moments only. Sick-bed visits especially should not be allowed to become visitations. Many a person with a chance for recovery has literally been talked into his grave by well-meaning callers. Intelligent nurses will quietly ask such people to remain away.
CHAPTER III
LETTER-WRITING
THE writing of letters, of the good old-fashioned kind, is rapidly becoming a thing of the past. People used to write epistles. Now they write notes. Before the days of the stenographer, the typewriter, the telegraph and telephone, when people made their own clothes by hand, wove their own sheets and had no time-saving machines, they found leisure to write epistles to their friends. Some of us are so fortunate as to have stowed away in an old trunk a bundle of these productions. The ink is pale and the paper yellowed, but the matter is still interesting. All the news of the family, the neighborhood gossip, the latest sayings and doings of the children and of callers, an account of the books read, of the minister’s last sermon and of the arrival of the newest of many olive branches, filled pages. What must these same pages have meant to the exile from home! And how much there was in such letters to answer!
Still, even in this day and generation, there are a few people who have so far held to the good old traditions that they write genuine letters. And—wonder of wonders!—they answer questions asked them in letters written by their correspondents. Only those who have written questions to which they desired prompt answers, appreciate how maddening it is to receive a letter that tells you everything except the answers to your queries. And this ignoring of the epistle one is supposed to be answering is a feature of the up-to-date letter-writer. There is, even in friendly correspondence, a right and a wrong way of doing a thing.
HOW NOT TO WRITE
The wrong, and well-nigh universal, way of treating a letter is as follows: It is read as rapidly as possible, pigeonholed and forgot. Weeks hence, in clearing out the desk it is found, the handwriting recognized, and it is laid aside to be answered later. When that “later” comes depends on the leisure of the owner. At last a so-called answer is hastily written without a second reading of the letter to which one is replying. Such a reply begins with an apology for a long and unavoidable silence, an account of how cruelly busy one is nowadays, a passing mention of the number of duties one has to perform, a wish that the two correspondents may meet in the near future and a rushing final sentence of affection followed by the signature. Such is the modern letter.
If a correspondent is worth having, she is worth treating fairly. Let her letter be read carefully, and laid aside until such time as one can have a half-hour of uninterrupted writing. Then, let the letter one would answer be read, and the questions it contains be answered in order, and first of all. This is common courtesy. After which one may write as much as time and inclination permit. If one has not the time to conduct one’s correspondence in this way, let one have fewer correspondents. It is more fair to them and to one’s self.