M!

I am glad you liked our doctor. Of course we reserve the right to say
anything about him we choose, but our feelings would be awfully hurt if
anybody else should make fun of him.

He and I are still superintending each other's reading. Last week he
appeared with Herbert Spencer's "System of Synthetic Philosophy" for
me to glance at. I gratefully accepted it, and gave him in return the
"Diary of Marie Bashkirtseff." Do you remember in college how we used to
enrich our daily speech with quotations from Marie? Well, Sandy took her
home and read her painstakingly and thoughtfully.

"Yes," he acknowledged today when he came to report, "it is a truthful
record of a certain kind of morbid, egotistical personality that
unfortunately does exist. But I can't understand why you care to
read it; for, thank God! Sally Lunn, you and Bash haven't anything in
common."

That's the nearest to a compliment he ever came, and I feel extremely
flattered. As to poor Marie, he refers to her as "Bash" because he can't
pronounce her name, and is too disdainful to try.

We have a child here, the daughter of a chorus girl, and she is a
conceited, selfish, vain, posing, morbid, lying little minx, but she has
eyelashes! Sandy has taken the most violent dislike to that child.
And since reading poor Marie's diary, he has found a new comprehensive
adjective for summing up all of her distressing qualities. He calls her
BASHY, and dismisses her.

Good-by and come again.

SALLIE.

P.S. My children show a distressing tendency to draw out their entire
bank accounts to buy candy.

Tuesday night. My dear Judy:

What do you think Sandy has done now? He has gone off on a pleasure trip
to that psychopathic institution whose head alienist visited us a month
or so ago. Did you ever know anything like the man? He is fascinated by
insane people, and can't let them alone.

When I asked for some parting medical instructions, he replied:

"Feed a cowld and hunger a colic and put nae faith in doctors."

With that advice, and a few bottles of cod-liver oil we are left to our
own devices. I feel very free and adventurous. Perhaps you had better
run up here again, as there's no telling what joyous upheaval I may
accomplish when out from under Sandy's dampening influence.

S.

THE JOHN GRIER HOME,

Friday.

Dear Enemy:

Here I stay lashed to the mast, while you run about the country
disporting yourself with insane people. And just as I was