LITMIR.BIZ

      Dear Mother:

      I have the greatest mind to be like a good girl in a book, and tell you that I have got my ideal place; I know you are so anxious; but I guess I had better not. I am not the least bit discouraged, for I am sure to find it, though it does seem a little too much on the shrinking violet order. When I think of the number of ideal places that I am adapted to, I wonder they can all escape me; and I know I shall run one of them down at last. There are places which I could have got before now if I had not set my mark so high. Only yesterday I was offered a situation as hello-girl at a telephone station, and I could be sitting this moment with the transmitter at my mouth, and the receivers strapped to both ears, and looking as if I were just going to be electrocuted, if I had chosen. Perhaps I may decide to go into Sunday journalism. How would you like that — if you knew what it was? My chum, Miss Hally, is a Sunday journalist, and perfect bundle of energy. I believe she could work me in easily. She is from the South, or Soath, as she calls it, and she is one of these Southern women you meet here in New York, who make you think Southern women got so much rest in the old slavery times, that they never want to rest any more. They beat us poor Northern things all hollow in getting places, and the fact is that the only place I've got yet is the place I live in. That boarding house got to be a little too much, and before my week was up, on Wednesday, I began prospecting. Miss Hally went round with me and it was very well she did, because it is easier to get out of a tight place if there are two of you, and to make up flattering excuses, than it is if there is only one. In New York you have to be so careful — you have no idea in Lake Ridge how careful. Whole neighborhoods are barred, and sometimes when the streets are nice you have to pass through others that are not; it's horrid. Well, it all ended, much sooner than we could expect, in our finding these two rooms, five pair up, in an apartment with respectable people who are glad to let them, and let us get breakfast in their kitchen. We go out for our lunches and dinners to a French boarding-house in the neighborhood, where the food is wonderful and the men all smoke cigarettes at the table; but they do not mean anything by it. Our rooms look south over a beautiful landscape of chimneys, and it is astonishing how all chimneys seem to be out of order and have to have something done to them; there is not a perfectly well chimney as far as the eye can reach. One room we use as a parlor, and the other has two let-down beds in it, and both are full of sun. It is delightful, and I know things are going to turn out just as I wish, for if you wish hard enough they have got to.

      You mustn't fret, or else I shall come home and shake you. My hundred dollars will last three months, or I will know the reason why. I think I will advertise, and get Miss Hally to go over the answers with me, and tell me which ones I had better follow up. She knows New York through and through, and if anyone can help me run down my ideal employer she can. I have not swerved from a single requirement: age, amiability, opulence, with an eye on Europe in the spring. She -will not have much for me to do: just notes to write, accounts to keep, friends to receive and excuse her to, reading aloud in the evenings, with a perfectly ridiculous consideration for my strength, because I am long and rather limp and slab-sided, and must be sick; I shall have to overcome her fears for my health before she will consent to take me even on trial, and nothing but something strangely fascinating in me will help me to win the day. The only condition she will make is that I shall pay you a good long visit in May, before we sail. Perhaps she will let me begin it before, if she sees I am homesick, which I shall not be, and you needn't think it. But I suppose the sunset still has that burnished crimson through the orchard and over the lake, and the Ridge woods are all red in it, and the vineyards black — how purple they were with grapes when I left! The chickens have gone to roost in the peach trees, and the guinea-hens are trying to make up their minds to, and you are standing by the gate looking wistfully down to the desolate depot for your runaway girl, and wondering how she is. She is very, very well, mum, and she is coming home with a pocketful of money to pay off that mortgage. But if you stand there at the gate, looking that way, mother, you will break my heart! Go in, this minute, or you will take cold, and then what shall I do? Give my love to all inquiring friends — very nasal love, and not sweeter than you can conscientiously make it. Then the neighbors will know that it is honest. Love to Lizzie, and tell her to be very good to you.

      Your affectionate daughter,

      Frances.