Concerning Sally

by William John Hopkins

"It's a shame," Mrs. Ladue said softly. "It's a perfect shame, Fox. If—if you want to live in it, there's no reason—"

Fox shook his head. "It wouldn't be best or wise, dear Mrs. Ladue," he said gently. "I can wait."

"Aren't you going to show it to us?" asked Mrs. Ladue then, with heightened color. "We should like to see the inside, shouldn't we, Sally?"

But Sally did not have a chance to reply. "Not to-day," said Fox. "Sometime, soon, I hope, but not to-day."

He said no more and Mrs. Ladue said nothing and Sally said nothing; and they went in again, by unanimous consent, and presently Mrs. Ladue and Sally and Patty drove away, although so early a departure was much against Patty's inclination. They would not have succeeded in getting her to go at all but that Fox took Doctor Beatty off to show him something, and Doctor Beatty thanked him, although he did not make it clear whether it was for wanting to show him the something or for taking him away. But Meriwether Beatty had shown a capacity for leaving Patty when he felt like it, so that I am forced to conclude that that had nothing to do with his thanks. When they got back to Mrs. Stump's they found a letter from Charlie waiting for them on the hall table. I may add that Patty found a letter from Charlie, also, but it was not like the one to his mother and Sally. It differed from theirs in several important particulars.

Charlie wrote a letter home every week, with unfailing regularity. It was a perfunctory letter, filled with the unimportant happenings at college. It never gave any information about himself except on those rare occasions when he had something favorable to report, and it did not need to be anything exceptionally favorable either.

He wrote to Patty irregularly, sometimes more often sometimes less, depending upon his needs. Once, when he had been having an unusually good run of luck, he let nearly three weeks elapse between letters, and then his next letter was almost seven pages long and contained no reference to money. Patty had been awaiting a letter nervously and opened this one with fear and trembling. The combination, after such an interval, transported Patty with delight, and she ran over at once to show the letter to Mrs. Ladue. It was the only one that she did show to Mrs. Ladue, for all the others either were evidently dictated by a necessity more or less dire, or they referred to previous "loans" of which Mrs. Ladue and Sally knew nothing. Patty always managed to supply his needs, although sometimes with extreme difficulty and with a great casting up of accounts, in which process many perfectly good pencils were consumed in a manner for which they were not intended. If the makers of pencils had designed them for such use, they would have made them with lolly-pops or chewing-gum on one end.

Charlie's letters to Patty were triumphs of art, and would have made his scholastic fortune if they could have been presented as daily themes. If they were not always free from error, they were always readable and the matter was treated in a way which unfailingly would have been of interest to any one but Patty, and they showed evidence of a lively and well-nourished imagination which was not allowed to become atrophied. "William Henry's Letters to his Grandmother," although of a somewhat different nature, were not a patch upon them.

But Patty was too much concerned about the matter treated in these letters to be interested in their literary value; and, besides, she was not in a position to know the extent of the exercise to which Charlie's imagination was subjected in the course of composition. Her own imagination was not without exercise, for she had to finance his requests.

Patty's financing, that winter, would have done credit to a promoter. She had already succeeded in getting herself involved deeply with the builder who was repairing her house and with Dick, although Dick was as yet in blissful ignorance of the fact. The builder had been paid but very little since Christmas; but he, being an elderly man who had known her father well, and who, accordingly, trusted any member of the family implicitly, had said nothing yet. Patty wondered, with some fear and trembling, how much longer he would go on without saying anything. And then she put the whole matter aside. She could not see her way out yet.