PS.  We’re having fancy dancing in gymnasium class.  You can see by the accompanying picture how much we look like a real ballet.  The one at the end accomplishing a graceful pirouette is me—­I mean I.

26th December
My Dear, Dear, Daddy,

Haven’t you any sense?  Don’t you know that you mustn’t give one girl seventeen Christmas presents?  I’m a Socialist, please remember; do you wish to turn me into a Plutocrat?

Think how embarrassing it would be if we should ever quarrel!  I should have to engage a moving-van to return your gifts.

I am sorry that the necktie I sent was so wobbly; I knit it with my own hands (as you doubtless discovered from internal evidence).  You will have to wear it on cold days and keep your coat buttoned up tight.

Thank you, Daddy, a thousand times.  I think you’re the sweetest man that ever lived—­and the foolishest! 
Judy

Here’s a four-leaf clover from Camp McBride to bring you good luck for the New Year.

9th January

Do you wish to do something, Daddy, that will ensure your eternal salvation?  There is a family here who are in awfully desperate straits.  A mother and father and four visible children—­ the two older boys have disappeared into the world to make their fortune and have not sent any of it back.  The father worked in a glass factory and got consumption—­it’s awfully unhealthy work—­ and now has been sent away to a hospital.  That took all their savings, and the support of the family falls upon the oldest daughter, who is twenty-four.  She dressmakes for $1.50 a day (when she can get it) and embroiders centrepieces in the evening.  The mother isn’t very strong and is extremely ineffectual and pious.  She sits with her hands folded, a picture of patient resignation, while the daughter kills herself with overwork and responsibility and worry; she doesn’t see how they are going to get through the rest of the winter—­and I don’t either.  One hundred dollars would buy some coal and some shoes for three children so that they could go to school, and give a little margin so that she needn’t worry herself to death when a few days pass and she doesn’t get work.

You are the richest man I know.  Don’t you suppose you could spare one hundred dollars?  That girl deserves help a lot more than I ever did.  I wouldn’t ask it except for the girl; I don’t care much what happens to the mother—­she is such a jelly-fish.

The way people are for ever rolling their eyes to heaven and saying, `Perhaps it’s all for the best,’ when they are perfectly dead sure it’s not, makes me enraged.  Humility or resignation or whatever you choose to call it, is simply impotent inertia.  I’m for a more militant religion!

We are getting the most dreadful lessons in philosophy—­all of Schopenhauer for tomorrow.  The professor doesn’t seem to realize that we are taking any other subject.  He’s a queer old duck; he goes about with his head in the clouds and blinks dazedly when occasionally he strikes solid earth.  He tries to lighten his lectures with an occasional witticism—­and we do our best to smile, but I assure you his jokes are no laughing matter.  He spends his entire time between classes in trying to figure out whether matter really exists or whether he only thinks it exists.