Daddy-Long-Legs and Dear Enemy by Jean Webster Read Free Book Online Page A

(35 cents) and for dessert, buckwheat cakes and maple syrup (15 cents). Nourishing and cheap.
    It was such a lark! Especially for me, because it was so awfully different from the asylum—I feel like an escaped convict every time I leave the campus. Before I thought, I started to tell the others what an experience I was having. The cat was almost out of the bag when I grabbed it by its tail and pulled it back. It’s awfully hard for me not to tell everything I know. I’m a very confiding soul by nature; if I didn’t have you to tell things to, I’d burst.
    We had a molasses candy pull last Friday evening, given by the house matron of Fergussen to the left-behinds in the other halls. Freshmen and Sophomores and Juniors and Seniors all united in amicable accord. The kitchen is huge, with copper pots and kettles hanging in rows on the stone wall—the littlest casserole among them about the size of a wash boiler. Four hundred girls live in Fergussen. The chef, in a white cap and apron, fetched out twenty-two other white caps and aprons—I can’t imagine where he got so many—and we all turned ourselves into cooks.
    It was great fun, though I have seen better candy. When it was finally finished, and ourselves and the kitchen and the doorknobs all thoroughly sticky, we organized a procession and still in our caps and aprons, each carrying a big fork or spoon or frying pan, we marched through the empty corridors to the officers’ parlor where half-a-dozen professors and instructors were passing a tranquil evening. We serenaded them with college songs and offered refreshments. They accepted politely but dubiously. We left them sucking chunks of molasses candy, sticky and speechless.
    So you see, Daddy, my education progresses!

    Don’t you really think that I ought to be an artist instead of an author?
    Vacation will be over in two days and I shall be glad to see the girls again. My tower is just a trifle lonely; when nine people occupy a house that was built for four hundred, they do rattle around a bit.
    Eleven pages—poor Daddy, you must be tired! I meant this to be just a short little thank-you note—but when I get started I seem to have a ready pen.
    Good-by, and thank you for thinking of me—I should be perfectly happy except for one little threatening cloud on the horizon. Examinations come in February.
    Yours with love,
    JUDY.
    P.S. Maybe it isn’t proper to send love? If it isn’t, please excuse. But I must love somebody and there’s only you and Mrs. Lippett to choose between, so you see—you’ll have to put up with it, Daddy dear, because I can’t love her.
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    On the Eve.
    Dear Daddy-Long-Legs,
    You should see the way this college is studying! We’ve forgotten we ever had a vacation. Fifty-seven irregular verbs have I introduced to my brain in the past four days—I’m only hoping they’ll stay till after examinations.
    Some of the girls sell their text-books when they’re through with them, but I intend to keep mine. Then after I’ve graduated I shall have my whole education in a row in the bookcase, and when I need to use any detail, I can turn to it without the slightest hesitation. So much easier and more accurate than trying to keep it in your head.
    Julia Pendleton dropped in this evening to pay a social call, and stayed a solid hour. She got started on the subject of family, and I couldn’t switch her off. She wanted to know what my mother’s maiden name was—did you ever hear such an impertinent question to ask of a person from a foundling asylum? I didn’t have the courage to say I didn’t know, so I just miserably plumped on the first name I could think of, and that was Montgomery. Then she wanted to know whether I belonged to the Massachusetts Montgomerys or the Virginia Montgomerys.
    Her mother was a Rutherford. The family came over in the ark, and were connected by marriage with