CHAPTER XX
MORE LETTERS
Mrs. Edwin Green, from Mrs. Kent Brown.
New York, April .., 19...
Your letter was good to get. Kent and I had begun to feel like -in-laws, it had been so long since you had written. Mother Brown, the usually faithful chronicler of all the doings and sayings of the family, had cut us off with a postal. Now that we know she is "keepin' keer" of little Mildred, we can understand her silence better. When Mother Brown does anything, she does it all over, and I am sure when she is doing such a thing as attend to anything so precious as her beloved grandchild she has no time for mere letter writing.
Kent and I were greatly interested in what you had to tell us of the charming Virginians you have met in Charleston. It was almost uncanny, in a way, to hear from you of these people, as we had just been hearing of them from a very nice young man with whom Kent has struck up an acquaintance at the Y. M. C. A. gym, where Kent goes regularly to keep from getting flabby. The young man's name is Reginald Kent. It was the name Kent that they had in common (one in front and one behind) that first brought them together. They were always getting mixed up on account of it, my Kent answering when the other Kent was called, and vice versa.
This young Mr. Kent is an illustrator and advertising artist. He really is very clever and very wide-awake. He was dining with us at the very time that your letter was brought to me, on the last mail. I had to open it and read part of it aloud. He had just been telling us of some cousins named Winn he visits in the country in Virginia, and of some Richmond girls whom he has met staying with Page Allison, and these girls are no other than your Tucker twins. He says the first time he met them he went on a deer hunt and that Miss Dum Tucker actually shot a deer. I was slightly incredulous, he thought, and to prove his story he took out of his pocketbook two kodak pictures, one of a very handsome, spirited-looking girl with her hair coming down and a rifle raised to her shoulder, and the other a fallen buck with a young girl kneeling beside him, her arms around his neck and her face buried on his shoulder. That one, he said, was Miss Dee, who wept buckets over the death of the buck, but managed afterward to partake of some of the venison.
I have an idea Mr. Reginald Kent thinks that Miss Dum Tucker is about the most attractive person he ever met. He is certainly very attractive himself, singularly wholesome and clean in appearance and mind. He seemed very happy at the prospect of this paragon of a girl's coming to New York to study. I will be very glad to be of any use to your friends I can, and if they do decide to come I will find board for them and mother them, too, if they need it. I know you are grinning at the idea of my mothering anything—I, the harum-scarum, the flibberty-jibberty—but I am really very much settled down. I am so steady and good that Kent is afraid I am sick.