“And what’s more,” she added, “I don’t know but what your mother ought to know about these goings-on. You’re only a little girl, with all your high and mightiness, and there’s going to be no scandal in this Familey if I can help it.”
I put the bedclothes over my head, and she went out.
But of course I could not sleep. Sis was not home yet, or mother, and I went into Sis’s room and got a novel from her table. It was the story of a woman who had married a man in a hurry, and without really loving him, and when she had been married a year, and hated the very way her husband drank his coffee and cut the ends off his cigars, she found some one she really loved with her Whole Heart. And it was too late. But she wrote him one Letter, the other man, you know, and it caused a lot of trouble. So she said—I remember the very words—
“Half the troubles in the world are caused by Letters. Emotions are changable things”—this was after she had found that she really loved her husband after all, but he had had to shoot himself before she found it out, although not fataly—“but the written word does not change. It remains always, embodying a dead truth and giving it apparent life. No woman should ever put her thoughts on paper.”
She got the Letter back, but she had to steal it. And it turned out that the other man had really only wanted her money all the time.
That story was a real ilumination to me. I shall have a great deal of money when I am of age, from my grandmother. I saw it all. It was a trap sure enough. And if I was to get out I would have to have the letter.
It was the Letter that put me in his power.
The next day was Xmas. I got a lot of things, including the necklace, and a mending basket from Sis, with the hope that it would make me tidey, and father had bought me a set of Silver Fox, which mother did not approve of, it being too expencive for a young girl to wear, according to her. I must say that for an hour or two I was happy enough.
But the afternoon was terrable. We keep open house on Xmas afternoon, and father makes a champagne punch, and somebody pours tea, although nobody drinks it, and there are little cakes from the Club, and the house is decorated with poin—(Memo: Not in the Dictionery and I cannot spell it, although not usualy troubled as to spelling.)
At eleven o’clock the mail came in, and mother sorted it over, while father took a gold piece out to the post-man.