Dear Enemy, Jean Webster [reading strategies book txt] 📗

ten picturesque cottages to put them in, with flowers in the front yard and rabbits and kittens and puppies and chickens in the back, we should be a perfectly presentable institution, and wouldn't be ashamed to have these charity experts come visiting us.

Thursday.

I started this letter three days ago, was interrupted to talk to a potential philanthropist (fifty tickets to the circus), and have not had time to pick up my pen since. Betsy has been in Philadelphia for three days, being a bridesmaid for a miserable cousin. I hope that no more of her family are thinking of getting married, for it's most upsetting to the J. G. H.

While there, she investigated a family who had applied for a child. Of course we haven't a proper investigating plant, but once in a while, when a family drops right into our arms, we do like to put the business through. As a usual thing, we work with the State Charities' Aid Association. They have a lot of trained agents traveling about the State, keeping in touch with families who are willing to take children, and with asylums that have them to give. Since they are willing to work for us, there is no slightest use in our going to the expense of peddling our own babies. And I do want to place out as many as are available, for I firmly believe that a private home is the best thing for the child, provided, of course, that we are very fussy about the character of the homes we choose. I don't require rich foster parents, but I do require kind, loving, intelligent parents. This time I think Betsy has landed a gem of a family. The child is not yet delivered or the papers signed, and of course there is always danger that they may give a sudden flop, and splash back into the water.

Ask Jervis if he ever heard of J. F. Bretland of Philadelphia. He seems to move in financial circles. The first I ever heard of him was a letter addressed to the "Supt. John Grier Home, Dear Sir,"--a curt, typewritten, businesslike letter, from an AWFULLY businesslike lawyer, saying that his wife had determined to adopt a baby girl of attractive appearance and good health between the ages of two and three years. The child must be an orphan of American stock, with unimpeachable heredity, and no relatives to interfere. Could I furnish one as required and oblige, yours truly, J. F. Bretland?

By way of reference he mentioned "Bradstreets." Did you ever hear of anything so funny? You would think he was opening a charge account at a nursery, and inclosing an order from our seed catalogue.

We began our usual investigation by mailing a reference blank to a clergyman in Germantown, where the J. F. B.'s reside.

Does he own any property?

Does he pay his bills?

Is he kind to animals?

Does he attend church?

Does he quarrel with his wife? And a dozen other impertinent questions.

We evidently picked a clergyman with a sense of humor. Instead of answering in laborious detail, he wrote up and down and across the sheet, "I wish they'd adopt me!"

This looked promising, so B. Kindred obligingly dashed out to Germantown as soon as the wedding breakfast was over. She is developing the most phenomenal detective instinct. In the course of a social call she can absorb from the chairs and tables a family's entire moral history.

She returned from Germantown bursting with enthusiastic details.

Mr. J. F. Bretland is a wealthy and influential citizen, cordially loved by his friends and deeply hated by his enemies (discharged employees, who do not hesitate to say that he is a HAR-RD man). He is a little shaky in his attendance at church, but his wife seems regular, and he gives money.

She is a charming, kindly, cultivated gentlewoman, just out of a sanatorium after a year of nervous prostration. The doctor says that what she needs is some strong interest in life, and advises adopting a child. She has always longed to do it, but her hard husband has stubbornly refused. But finally, as always, it is the gentle, persistent wife who has triumphed, and hard husband has been forced to give in. Waiving his own natural preference for a boy, he wrote, as above, the usual request for a blue-eyed girl.

Mrs. Bretland, with the firm intention of taking a child, has been reading up for years, and there is no detail of infant dietetics that she does not know. She has a sunny nursery, with a southwestern exposure, all ready. And a closet full of surreptitiously gathered dolls! She has made the clothes for them herself,--she showed them to Betsy with the greatest pride,--so you can understand the necessity for a girl.

She has just heard of an excellent English trained nurse that she can secure, but she isn't sure but that it would be better to start with a French nurse, so that the child can learn the language before her vocal cords are set. Also, she was extremely interested when she heard that Betsy was a college woman. She couldn't make up her mind whether to send the baby to college or not. What was Betsy's honest opinion? If the child were Betsy's own daughter, would Betsy send her to college?

All this would be funny if it weren't so pathetic; but really I can't get away from the picture of that poor lonely woman sewing those doll clothes for the little unknown girl that she wasn't sure she could have. She lost her own two babies years ago, or, rather, she never had them; they were never alive.

You can see what a good home it's going to be. There's lots of love waiting for the little mite, and that is better than all the wealth which, in this case, goes along.

But the problem now is to find the child, and that isn't easy. The J. F. Bretlands are so abominably explicit in their requirements. I have just the baby boy to give them; but with that closetful of dolls, he is impossible. Little Florence won't do--one tenacious parent living. I've a wide variety of foreigners with liquid brown eyes--won't do at all. Mrs. Bretland is a blonde, and daughter must resemble her. I have several sweet little mites with unspeakable heredity, but the Bretlands want six generations of church-attending grandparents, with a colonial governor at the top. Also I have a darling little curly-headed girl (and curls are getting rarer and rarer), but illegitimate. And that seems to be an unsurmountable barrier in the eyes of adopting parents, though, as a matter of fact, it makes no slightest difference in the child. However, she won't do. The Bretlands hold out sternly for a marriage certificate.

There remains just one child out of all these one hundred and seven that appears available. Our little Sophie's father and mother were killed in a railroad accident, and the only reason she wasn't killed was because they had just left her in a hospital to get an abscess cut out of her throat. She comes from good common American stock, irreproachable and uninteresting in every way. She's a washed-out, spiritless, whiney little thing. The doctor has been pouring her full of his favorite cod-liver oil and spinach, but he can't get any cheerfulness into her.

However, individual love and care does accomplish wonders in institution children, and she may bloom into something rare and beautiful after a few months' transplanting. So I yesterday wrote a glowing account of her immaculate family history to J. F. Bretland, offering to deliver her in Germantown.

This morning I received a telegram from J. F. B. Not at all! He does not purpose to buy any daughter sight unseen. He will come and inspect the child in person at three o'clock on Wednesday next.

Oh dear, if he shouldn't like her! We are now bending all our energies toward enhancing that child's beauty-like a pup bound for the dog show. Do you think it would be awfully immoral if I rouged her cheeks a suspicion? She is too young to pick up the habit.

Heavens! what a letter! A million pages written without a break. You can see where my heart is. I'm as excited over little Sophie's settling in life as though she were my own darling daughter.

Respectful regards to the president.

SAL. McB.

Dear Gordon:

That was an obnoxious, beastly, low-down trick not to send me a cheering line for four weeks just because, in a period of abnormal stress I once let you go for three. I had really begun to be worried for fear you'd tumbled into the Potomac. My chicks would miss you dreadfully; they love their uncle Gordon. Please remember that you promised to send them a donkey.

Please also remember that I'm a busier person than you. It's a lot harder to run the John Grier Home than the House of Representatives. Besides, you have more efficient people to help.

This isn't a letter; it's an indignant remonstrance. I'll write tomorrow--or the next day.

S.

P.S. On reading your letter over again I am slightly mollified, but dinna think I believe a' your saft words. I ken weel ye only flatter when ye speak sae fair.

July 17.

Dear Judy:

I have a history to recount.

This, please remember, is Wednesday next. So at half-past two o'clock our little Sophie was bathed and brushed and clothed in fine linen, and put in charge of a trusty orphan, with anxious instructions to keep her clean.

At three-thirty to the minute--never have I known a human being so disconcertingly businesslike as J. F. Bretland--an automobile of expensive foreign design rolled up to the steps of this imposing chateau. A square-shouldered, square-jawed personage, with a chopped-off mustache and a manner that inclines one to hurry, presented himself three minutes later at my library door. He greeted me briskly as "Miss McKosh." I gently corrected him, and he changed to "Miss McKim." I indicated my most soothing armchair, and invited him to take some light refreshment after his journey. He accepted a glass of water (I admire a temperate parent), and evinced an impatient desire to be done with the business. So I rang the bell and ordered the little Sophie to be brought down.

"Hold on, Miss McGee!" said he to me. "I'd rather see her in her own environment. I will go with you to the playroom or corral or wherever you keep your youngsters."

So I led him to the nursery, where thirteen or fourteen mites in gingham rompers were tumbling about on mattresses on the floor. Sophie, alone in the glory of feminine petticoats, was ensconced in the blue-ginghamed arms of a very bored orphan. She was squirming and fighting to get down, and her feminine petticoats were tightly wound about her neck. I took her in my arms, smoothed her clothes, wiped her nose, and invited her to look at the gentleman.

That child's whole future hung upon five minutes of sunniness, and instead of a single smile, she WHINED!

Mr. Bretland shook her hand in a very gingerly fashion and chirruped to her as you might to a pup. Sophie took not the slightest notice of him, but turned her back, and buried her face in my neck. He shrugged his shoulders, supposed that they could take her on trial. She might suit his wife; he himself didn't want one, anyway. And we turned to go out.

Then who should come toddling straight across his path but that