RED BLOOD OR BLUE
By E. Montgomery
Dear Lou:
“This is the last letter I shall write to you, for to-morrow I begin the final stage of my transition. At four o’clock I shall become a lady. To be sure, you and I will know that I am only an imitation, but with an eighteen-carat setting every one else will take me for the real thing.
“Lou, I’ve been wondering how many generations it will take to make a real lady. My daughter perhaps will be one, and if not, then her daughter; but I will always be an imitation.
“My grandmother did day’s work to give my mother a schooling, and my mother helped in the shop so that I could have dancing lessons before I was six. I can’t disappoint them, and I can’t shirk my duty toward my children yet to be born. They stretch out their hands to me, asking I know not what, so to-morrow I give them a gentleman father. Yes, Lou, he is a little man, not much higher than my shoulder, and he is fat and jaded and old; but he has a name which can unlock the holy of holies in New York, and I may enter it with him, for I shall be his wife.
“They tell me I should be proud of my conquest, and I am, for it is not my gold alone which has ensnared him, but myself; and I am beautiful, Lou. It is three years since you have seen me, and I grow lovelier every day.
“I am tall, divinely tall; slender of hip and full of bosom, with all the promise of ripening womanhood. And to-morrow my maidenhood is to be sacrificed on the altar of holy (?) matrimony, and the metamorphosis will be complete. I shall be a lady.
“Oh, Lou, why wasn’t your father a gentleman? He might have been a rake, a roué, a gambler—anything, so long as he was a gentleman. But he is only my father’s boyhood friend, and still a village carpenter.
“You had to work your way through college, and my father rolled me through on the almighty dollar.