urse I get a lot of notes and bids to dinner, but I don't
mind them cause I have had them all my life. The only difference now,
the spelling is good in these and they are supposed to come from
gentlemen. Yet I tear them up just as easy as I did the other kind. Mrs.
Smith is always scared about me. I showed her a mash note once and she
sure threw a fit, but I tell her she don't need to worry about me, I
know how to take care of myself all right, as I have been doing it all
my life. I seen too much crookedness and I have seen that it don't pay.
I never knew a girl yet that went the limit but landed hard some day on
the pavement. Even you was straight, Kate, your only trouble is that
your hands are too small, and when you married Jim and he showed you how
easy they went in other people's pockets, you kinda took to it natural.
I suppose that is because of father who is a born dip and it had to come
out again in some of the family. I wonder if lots of people ain't
crooked cause they don't know no better. I have been thinking a lot
lately about education. Mr. Smith was a teacher in a boy's school in
England, and he talks sometimes about the right kind of learning, and I
sit by and listen trying to hear all I can that will help Billy. Mr.
Smith says that if a boy has got the right kind of education, he will
just naturally choose the right things in life. He don't believe because
Billy's father and his grandfather are dips that that is any reason that
Billy should be one. He says, give him the right kind of schooling and
teachers that will understand him or show him what kind of books to read
and tell him the great things that have been done by other men, and that
he can do it if he tries, that it will make him ambitious and he will
naturally choose the right kind of a life instead of the wrong kind. He
will go with the right kind of people, instead of the wrong kind.

He wants to make Paul an electrical engineer, but first he wants him to
go to college and get a lot of book-learning, so when he is by himself
he will be willing to sit by the fire and read some book he loves
instead of chasing down the Great White Way to find amusement. He says a
man must know something besides his business or when he ain't working he
won't know what to do with himself. Them is the men, he says, that fill
the night restaurants and sets in the front row at the Burlesques. He
believes that if men were educated in the way they orter be, there would