Daddy Long Legs

Do you want to know something? I have three pairs of kid gloves. I've

had kid mittens before from the Christmas tree, but never real kid

gloves with five fingers. I take them out and try them on every little

while. It's all I can do not to wear them to classes.

(Dinner bell. Goodbye.)

Friday

What do you think, Daddy? The English instructor said that my last

paper shows an unusual amount of originality. She did, truly. Those

were her words. It doesn't seem possible, does it, considering the

eighteen years of training that I've had? The aim of the John Grier

Home (as you doubtless know and heartily approve of) is to turn the

ninety-seven orphans into ninety-seven twins.

The unusual artistic ability which I exhibit was developed at an early

age through drawing chalk pictures of Mrs. Lippett on the woodshed door.

I hope that I don't hurt your feelings when I criticize the home of my

youth? But you have the upper hand, you know, for if I become too

impertinent, you can always stop payment of your cheques. That isn't a

very polite thing to say--but you can't expect me to have any manners;

a foundling asylum isn't a young ladies' finishing school.

You know, Daddy, it isn't the work that is going to be hard in college.

It's the play. Half the time I don't know what the girls are talking

about; their jokes seem to relate to a past that every one but me has

shared. I'm a foreigner in the world and I don't understand the

language. It's a miserable feeling. I've had it all my life. At the

high school the girls would stand in groups and just look at me. I was

queer and different and everybody knew it. I could FEEL 'John Grier

Home' written on my face. And then a few charitable ones would make a

point of coming up and saying something polite. I HATED EVERY ONE OF

THEM--the charitable ones most of all.

Nobody here knows that I was brought up in an asylum. I told Sallie

McBride that my mother and father were dead, and that a kind old

gentleman was sending me to college which is entirely true so far as it

goes. I don't want you to think I am a coward, but I do want to be

like the other girls, and that Dreadful Home looming over my childhood

is the one great big difference. If I can turn my back on that and

shut out the remembrance, I think, I might be just as desirable as any

other girl. I don't believe there's any real, underneath difference,

do you?