December 19th

Dear Daddy-Long-Legs,

You never answered my question and it was very important. ARE YOU BALD?

I have it planned exactly what you look like – very satisfactorily – until I reach the top of your head, and then I stop. I can’t decide whether you have white hair or black hair or sort of sprinkly grey hair or maybe none at all.

Would you like to know what colour your eyes are? They’re grey, and your eyebrows stick out like a porch roof, and your mouth is a straight line with a tendency to turn down at the corners. Oh, you see, I know! You’re an actual old thing with a temper.

(Chapel bell.)

P.m.

I have a new unbreakable rule: never to study at night no matter how many written reviews are coming in the morning. Instead, I read just plain books – I have to, you know, because there are eighteen blank years behind me. You wouldn’t believe, Daddy, what an abyss of ignorance my mind is; I am just realizing the depths myself.

I never read “Mother Goose” or “David Copperfield” or “Ivanhoe” or “Cinderella” or “Blue Beard” or “Robinson Crusoe” or “Jane Eyre” or “Alice in Wonderland” or a word of Rudyard Kipling. I didn’t know that Henry the Eighth was married more than once or that Shelley was a poet. I didn’t know that people used to be monkeys and that the Garden of Eden was a beautiful myth. I didn’t know that George Eliot was a lady. I had never seen a picture of the “Mona Lisa” and (it’s true but you won’t believe it) I had never heard of Sherlock Holmes.

Now, I know all of these things and a lot of others besides, but you can see how much I need to catch up. And oh, but it’s fun! I look forward all day to evening, and then I put a “do not disturb” on the door and get into my nice red bath robe and furry slippers and pile all the cushions behind me on the couch, and light the lamp at my elbow, and read and read and read. One book isn’t enough. I have four going at once. Just now, they’re Tennyson’s poems and “Vanity Fair” and Kipling’s “Plain Tales”. I find that I am the only girl in college who wasn’t brought up on “Little Women”. I haven’t told anybody though (that would stamp me as strange). I just quietly went and bought it with $1.12 of my last month’s allowance.

(Ten o’clock bell. This is a very interrupted letter.)

Sunday

The Christmas holidays begin next week and the trunks are up. The corridors are so filled up that you can hardly get through, and everybody is so noisy with excitement that studying is getting left out. I’m going to have a beautiful time in vacation; there’s another Freshman who lives in Texas staying behind, and we are planning to take long walks and if there’s any ice – learn to skate. Then there is still the whole library to be read – and three empty weeks to do it in!

Goodbye, Daddy, I hope that you are feeling as happy as am.

Yours ever,

Judy

P.S. Don’t forget to answer my question. If you don’t want the trouble of writing, have your secretary telegraph. He can just say:

Mr. Smith is quite bald,

or

Mr. Smith is not bald,

or

Mr. Smith has white hair.

And you can spend the twenty-five cents out of my allowance.

Goodbye till January – and a merry Christmas!

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