Dear Enemy

Loretta is to learn housework and have a little garden of her own, and

particularly play out of doors in the sunshine. She is to go to bed

early and be fed up on nice nourishing food, and they are to pet her and

make her happy. All this for three dollars a week!

Why not find a hundred such families, and board out all the children?

Then this building could be turned into an idiot asylum, and I, not

knowing anything about idiots, could conscientiously resign and go back

home and live happily ever after.

Really, Judy, I am growing frightened. This asylum will get me if I stay

long enough. I am becoming so interested in it that I can't think or

talk or dream of anything else. You and Jervis have blasted all my

prospects in life.

Suppose I should retire and marry and have a family. As families go

nowadays, I couldn't hope for more than five or six children at the

most, and all with the same heredity. But, mercy! such a family appears

perfectly insignificant and monotonous. You have institutionalized me.

Reproachfully yours,

SALLIE McBRIDE.

P.S. We have a child here whose father was lynched. Isn't that a piquant

detail to have in one's history?

Tuesday.

Dearest Judy:

What shall we do? Mamie Prout does not like prunes. This antipathy to a

cheap and healthful foodstuff is nothing but imagination, and ought

not to be countenanced among the inmates of a well-managed institution.

Mamie must be made to like prunes. So says our grammar teacher, who

spends the noonday hour with us and overlooks the morals of our charges.

About one o'clock today she marched Mamie to my office charged with the

offense of refusing, ABSOLUTELY refusing, to open her mouth and put in

a prune. The child was plumped down on a stool to await punishment from

me.

Now, as you know, I do not like bananas, and I should hate awfully to be

forced to swallow them; so, by the same token, why should I force Mamie

Prout to swallow prunes?

While I was pondering a course that would seem to uphold Miss Keller's

authority, but would at the same time leave a loophole for Mamie, I was

called to the telephone.

"Sit there until I come back," I said, and went out and closed the door.

The message was from a kind lady wishing to motor me to a committee

meeting. I didn't tell you that I am organizing local interest in our

behalf. The idle rich who possess estates in this neighborhood are

beginning to drift out from town, and I am laying my plans to catch

them before they are deflected by too many garden parties and tennis

tournaments. They have never been of the slightest use to this asylum,

and I think it's about time they woke up to a realization of our

presence.