Dear Enemy

Does he pay his bills?

Is he kind to animals?

Does he attend church?

Does he quarrel with his wife? And a dozen other impertinent questions.

We evidently picked a clergyman with a sense of humor. Instead of

answering in laborious detail, he wrote up and down and across the

sheet, "I wish they'd adopt me!"

This looked promising, so B. Kindred obligingly dashed out to Germantown

as soon as the wedding breakfast was over. She is developing the most

phenomenal detective instinct. In the course of a social call she can

absorb from the chairs and tables a family's entire moral history.

She returned from Germantown bursting with enthusiastic details.

Mr. J. F. Bretland is a wealthy and influential citizen, cordially loved

by his friends and deeply hated by his enemies (discharged employees,

who do not hesitate to say that he is a HAR-RD man). He is a little

shaky in his attendance at church, but his wife seems regular, and he

gives money.

She is a charming, kindly, cultivated gentlewoman, just out of a

sanatorium after a year of nervous prostration. The doctor says that

what she needs is some strong interest in life, and advises adopting

a child. She has always longed to do it, but her hard husband has

stubbornly refused. But finally, as always, it is the gentle, persistent

wife who has triumphed, and hard husband has been forced to give in.

Waiving his own natural preference for a boy, he wrote, as above, the

usual request for a blue-eyed girl.

Mrs. Bretland, with the firm intention of taking a child, has been

reading up for years, and there is no detail of infant dietetics

that she does not know. She has a sunny nursery, with a southwestern

exposure, all ready. And a closet full of surreptitiously gathered

dolls! She has made the clothes for them herself,--she showed them to

Betsy with the greatest pride,--so you can understand the necessity for

a girl.

She has just heard of an excellent English trained nurse that she can

secure, but she isn't sure but that it would be better to start with a

French nurse, so that the child can learn the language before her vocal

cords are set. Also, she was extremely interested when she heard that

Betsy was a college woman. She couldn't make up her mind whether to

send the baby to college or not. What was Betsy's honest opinion? If the

child were Betsy's own daughter, would Betsy send her to college?

All this would be funny if it weren't so pathetic; but really I can't

get away from the picture of that poor lonely woman sewing those doll

clothes for the little unknown girl that she wasn't sure she could have.

She lost her own two babies years ago, or, rather, she never had them;

they were never alive.