body;
and you're the only one I know. Please excuse my exuberance; I'll
settle pretty soon. If my letters bore you, you can always toss them
into the wastebasket. I promise not to write another till the middle
of November.

Yours most loquaciously,
Judy Abbott

15th November

Dear Daddy-Long-Legs,

Listen to what I've learned to-day.

The area of the convex surface of the frustum of a regular pyramid is
half the product of the sum of the perimeters of its bases by the
altitude of either of its trapezoids.

It doesn't sound true, but it is--I can prove it!

You've never heard about my clothes, have you, Daddy? Six dresses, all
new and beautiful and bought for me--not handed down from somebody
bigger. Perhaps you don't realize what a climax that marks in the
career of an orphan? You gave them to me, and I am very, very, VERY
much obliged. It's a fine thing to be educated--but nothing compared
to the dizzying experience of owning six new dresses. Miss Pritchard,
who is on the visiting committee, picked them out--not Mrs. Lippett,
thank goodness. I have an evening dress, pink mull over silk (I'm
perfectly beautiful in that), and a blue church dress, and a dinner
dress of red veiling with Oriental trimming (makes me look like a
Gipsy), and another of rose-coloured challis, and a grey street suit,
and an every-day dress for classes. That wouldn't be an awfully big
wardrobe for Julia Rutledge Pendleton, perhaps, but for Jerusha
Abbott--Oh, my!

I suppose you're thinking now what a frivolous, shallow little beast
she is, and what a waste of money to educate a girl?

But, Daddy, if you'd been dressed in checked ginghams all your life,
you'd appreciate how I feel. And when I started to the high school, I
entered upon another period even worse than the checked ginghams.

The poor box.

You can't know how I dreaded appearing in school in those miserable
poor-box dresses. I was perfectly sure to be put down in class next to
the girl who first owned my dress, and she would whisper and giggle and
point it out to the others. The bitterness of wearing your enemies'
cast-off clothes eats into your soul. If I wore silk stockings for the
rest of my life, I don't believe I could obliterate the scar.

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