Dear Couzin: I am well. Am just about crazy this week to go home. See
notice enclosed you football game.
And so on and on. Only what it really said was "I am crazy to see you."
(In giving this Code I am betraying no secrets, as they have quarreled
and everything is now over between them.) As I had nobody, at that time, and as I had visions of a Career, I was
a man-hater. I acknowledge that this was a pose. But after all, what is
life but a pose?
"Stupid things!" I always said. "Nothing in their heads but football and
tobacco smoke. Women," I said, "are only their playthings. And when they
do grow up and get a little intellagence they use it in making money."
There has been a story in the school--I got it from one of the little
girls--that I was disapointed in love in early youth, the object of my
atachment having been the Tener in our Church choir at home. I daresay I
should have denied the soft impeachment, but I did not. It was, although
not appearing so at the time, my first downward step on the path that
leads to destruction.
"The way of the Transgresser is hard"--Bible.
I come now to the momentous day of my return to my dear home for
Christmas. Father and my sister Leila, who from now on I will term
"Sis," met me at the station. Sis was very elegantly dressed, and she
said: "Hello, Kid," and turned her cheek for me to kiss.
She is, as I have stated, but 20 months older than I, and depends
altogether on her clothes for her beauty. In the morning she is plain,
although having a good skin. She was trimmed up with a bouquet of
violets as large as a dishpan, and she covered them with her hands when
I kissed her.
She was waved and powdered, and she had on a perfectly new Outfit. And
I was shabby. That is the exact word. Shabby. If you have to hang your
entire Wardrobe in a closet ten inches deep, and put it over you on cold
nights, with the steam heat shut off at ten o'clock, it does not make it
look any better.
My father has always been my favorite member of the family, and he was
very glad to see me. He has a great deal of tact, also, and later on he
slipped ten dollars in my purse in the motor. I needed it very much,
as after I had paid the porter and bought luncheon, I had only three
dollars left and an I. O. U. from one of the girls for seventy-five
cents, which this may remind her, if it is read in class, she has
forgoten.