Meeting Street,
Charleston, S. C.,
April .., 19...
No doubt you and Kent will be astonished to find that Edwin and I are actually on the long talked-of trip to this wonderful old city. Mother is taking care of little Mildred in our absence, and Dr. McLean is to be called if she sneezes or coughs or does anything in the least out of the way. She is such a blooming, rosy baby, and so thoroughly normal that I am sure it is perfectly safe to leave her. Mother says she is more like Kent than any of her babies.
Charleston is more delightful even than it has been pictured. We only got here yesterday morning, and already we love it as though we belonged here. We went to a hotel for one night, but by rare good chance have found board in one of the real old Charleston homes.
You will laugh when I tell you that after an acquaintance of about twenty-four hours I find myself the chaperone of three girls about seventeen years old. I know you and Kent are grinning and saying to each other: "Some more of Molly's lame ducks!" but I can assure you they are as far from being that as any girls you ever saw. They are the Tucker twins, Dum and Dee, otherwise known as Virginia and Caroline, and their friend, Page Allison—all from Virginia. They have come down here with Mr. Tucker, the father of the twins, a newspaper man from Richmond, but he has had to go to Columbia on his paper's business and I volunteered to look after the girls in his absence. He is a delightful man, and he and Edwin are already Greening and Tuckering each other, which means that they struck up quite a friendship. He is the most absurdly young person to be the father of these strapping twins. He looks younger than Edwin, but I fancy he must be a little older. You know Edwin's "high forehead" makes him look older than he is.
The Tucker twins are bright, handsome, generous, original—everything you like to see in young girls. Their mother died when they were tiny babies and their young father has had the raising of them. A pretty good job he has made of it, too, although he declares he has done nothing toward bringing them up but just remove obstacles. They call their father Zebedee, because of the old joke about "Who's the father of Zebedee's children?" They say nobody ever believes he is their father. Dum is most artistic, wants to be a sculptor. She hopes to study in New York next winter. Dee is as fond of lame ducks as you used to say I was, and may make a trained nurse of herself, or perhaps a veterinary surgeon.
Their friend, Page Allison, is a delightful girl. She is the daughter of a country doctor, and has been the twins' room-mate at boarding school. By the way, these girls had heard of you, and me too, from Mattie Ball, who has been teaching them English literature at Gresham. (Mattie had been most complimentary to us both, so they have an exalted idea of us.) Page is lots of fun. She is in for anything that is going, but at the same time acts as a kind of balance wheel for the twins, who are a harum-scarum pair. Page has a writing bee in her bonnet, which of course appeals to me. You would have been amused to see both of us whip out our notebooks to take down things that we did not want to forget. Mr. Tucker is evidently very much interested in this little girl, more interested than he knows himself, and she is perfectly unconscious of his feeling in any way differently from the way he feels for his own daughters. I may be mistaken, however. I know when one is so happily married as I am it is a great temptation to be constantly match-making.
I fancy you and Kent are wondering why I should go to as interesting a place as Charleston and then find nothing to write about but three schoolgirls. Charleston is thrilling indeed, but you know I always did think more of people than things. We are seeing the sights very thoroughly—have deciphered every inscription on the old tombstones in three cemeteries, and are going tomorrow to Magnolia Cemetery. They say there is the most wonderful old live oak tree there in the world.
Now that we are settled in a boarding-house, kept by two old befo'-the-war ladies, we may stay here quite a little while. Edwin needs this rest that the Easter recess fortunately offered him.
I wish I could picture these old ladies to you, but they are too wonderful to try to describe. Whistler's mother does not belong in the frame in which her artist son placed her any more than these ladies belong in this old house. They hate boarders. You can see it in spite of their punctilious manners and old-world courtesy. I believe we are the first they have had, and if they only knew how much nicer we are than most boarders, I fancy they would not hate us quite so much. Mother always says that being a boarder changes one's whole nature—the gentlest and most generous becoming stern and exacting. At any rate, Edwin and I have not been boarders long enough to become very hateful, and these three girls could board forever and never become professionals in that line.
Please write to me soon. I am so glad Kent's firm won the competition for that great hotel. Tell him it is too bad I can't be there to tell him where the closets ought to be and which way the doors should open. He and I never agree on these points, you remember. It is splendid that you keep up your painting. I have no patience with these persons who insist that a career and matrimony cannot go hand in hand. Of course my little Mildred is very engrossing, but I do not intend to let her take every moment of the day and night. I find if I am going to write, however, that I cannot sew, but you know sewing was never one of my strong points. Giving it up is like Huck Finn's giving up stealing green persimmons. If occasionally, and only occasionally, I can persuade a magazine to see how worth printing one of my stories is, and I can make an honest penny that way, it is surely no extravagance to get someone to make Mildred's little clothes and to buy mine ready-made.