Dear Enemy

November 20.

Dear Judy:

Your motherly solicitude is sweet, but I didn't mean what I said.

Of course it's perfectly safe to convey Judy, junior, to the temperately

tropical lands that are washed by the Caribbean. She'll thrive as

long as you don't set her absolutely on top of the equator. And your

bungalow, shaded by palms and fanned by sea breezes, with an ice machine

in the back yard and an English doctor across the bay, sounds made for

the rearing of babies.

My objections were all due to the selfish fact that I and the John Grier

are going to be lonely without you this winter. I really think it's

entrancing to have a husband who engages in such picturesque pursuits

as financing tropical railroads and developing asphalt lakes and rubber

groves and mahogany forests. I wish that Gordon would take to life

in those picturesque countries; I'd be more thrilled by the romantic

possibilities of the future. Washington seems awfully commonplace

compared with Honduras and Nicaragua and the islands of the Caribbean.

I'll be down to wave good-by.

ADDIO!

SALLIE.

November 24.

Dear Gordon:

Judy has gone back to town, and is sailing next week for Jamaica, where

she is to make her headquarters while Jervis cruises about adjacent

waters on these entertaining new ventures of his. Couldn't you engage in

traffic in the South Seas? I think I'd feel pleasanter about leaving my

asylum if you had something romantic and adventurous to offer instead.

And think how beautiful you'd be in those white linen clothes! I really

believe I might be able to stay in love with a man quite permanently if

he always dressed in white.

You can't imagine how I miss Judy. Her absence leaves a dreadful hole in

my afternoons. Can't you run up for a week end soon? I think the sight

of you would be very cheering, and I'm feeling awfully down of late.

You know, my dear Gordon, I like you much better when you're right here

before my eyes than when I merely think about you from a distance. I

believe you must have a sort of hypnotic influence. Occasionally, after

you've been away a long time, your spell wears a little thin. But when I

see you, it all comes back. You've been away now a long, long time; so,

please come fast and bewitch me over again!

S.

December 2.

Dear Judy:

Do you remember in college, when you and I used to plan our favorite

futures, how we were forever turning our faces southward? And now to

think it has really come true, and you are there, coasting around those

tropical isles! Did you ever have such a thrill in the whole of your

life, barring one or two connected with Jervis, as when you came up on

deck in the early dawn and found yourself riding at anchor in the harbor

of Kingston, with the water so blue and the palms so green and the beach

so white?