“I shall have to begin with apologies again,” commenced Betty Lee’s letter to her earliest chum, with whom she still carried on the fitful correspondence. “But one good thing is that you know how it is yourself. And the longer you wait to get at writing the more likely you are to put it off, since there keep coming more things to tell.

“However, I’ve had a letter in mind for ages and I’m going to tell you EVERYTHING and answer all your questions. So this may string out for PAGES. Be PREPARED. As you see, I’m using Father’s typewriter and I’m learning to use it fairly well now. 5hi$ i$ the way I began @nd 8 though*t it w@S greAT Fun. amy LOU¢Who i$ allowed to 5ry if She is very c@reful¢had a g@me wi5h me to $EE if we cou#d re@d eaCH Others writing. I hope you get it!

“By the way, don’t start in reading this to Sue, if I’m going to tell you EVERYTHING as of yore, since All that I shall say will not be for publication. Do you remember how in our notes to each other we printed in capitals the words we desired emphasized? What good times we used to have! Well, we have good times now, only different, and I wish I could see you oftener.

“I’m thinking right now that it’s a real consolation to have somebody who knows you of old, somebody that you grew up with. No matter how wildly I RAVE ON, you will understand, I rather think, and will not be too critical—supplying a grain of salt here, if I’m extravagant in my remarks, and a bit of imagination there, when I give you a hint! Now don’t think that any dark secret is to be revealed, but I’m sure that you will instinctively know what I am confiding just to you.

“I wrote you after we moved, I’m sure, and told you how much we like the house. For fear I omitted something I’ll just say that it is a brick colonial, with a pretty approach and entrance, shrubbery and trees and flower beds and vines that will look wonderful again after winter is over. I’ve had one party in the big rooms downstairs and Mother has had a few teas and friends in to dinner. She likes to entertain in small numbers best, to visit.

“Doris had her party, too, and I thought I’d perish with mirth when I overheard Dick tell his best chum, as they clattered down from Dick’s room one day, that he ‘thought he’d sling a stag party pretty soon.’ He ‘slung’ it and we all pitched in to make the boys have a good time with especially good things to eat. But the twins want to entertain together, for the most part and most of their friends are in their class—sophomores, now!

“Best of all, Father is pretty sure that he will buy the place, and then we shall feel settled. It depends, naturally, on when the necessary SPONDULICS are at hand and Father does not speak of that. But it is pleasant to have a nice home, and though we’ll never try to live up the the MURCHISON MILLIONS, we are glad to have a whole house to ourselves, with plenty of room to spread out and somebody to help Mother. We girls still do little things and are supposed to take care of our own mending, etc.; but Mother gives us our time for lessons and other things and I’m sometimes in such a rush that I wish I had a maid, like Lucia, to pick up after me! Father does not seem to think that I am PERMANENT here and teases me a little sometimes. But more of that anon. You know how he is!

“Now to give you a bird’s eye view of what I am doing. First and foremost, I’m trying to run the G. A. A. The girls usually elect the spring before but it was put off and put off until it was not done at all. So several of us were nominated and I was elected, and although I was pleased with the honor my heart almost sank at the JOB! Still, it hasn’t been so bad because our class has always been greatly interested in athletics and I can head almost any committee with a capable senior girl and leave it to her to carry things out. We’ve had membership campaigns and pep squads and the usual games and contests. I must remember to send you copies of the Roar, from time to time. Sometimes the write-up is real cute.

“It would take me a week to write you about all the doings, from home room elections and meetings, Girl Reserve programs—under Kathryn as president this year—to the exciting football games of the boys’ teams. Our school won the championship and the boys are working hard to make the basketball record as good.

“Our senior hockey team, of which I was the captain, WON! I certainly was glad of that! I’m not on the basketball team because the folks don’t want me to be, but I’m almost as interested. Both Carolyn Gwynne and Kathryn Allen are playing. ‘Finny’ could not get on this time. Gwen Penrose turned out to be a wonderful player and is captain! We ought to win the inter-class contests, which are already posted. We play each class, of course—I’ll scribble off the schedule and enclose it. The seniors begin the games, playing the sophomores on February eleventh. We have the usual crazy names for our teams.

“But what is most interesting of all to me is the annual mileage swim, or MARATHON, and I hope to have chevrons and points and so on. I’ve told you all about honors before. That is one reason for this letter. I am supposed to be resting after swimming ‘lengths.’ Then we seniors want the class championship, and so many of us are good swimmers, easy swimmers, that we stand a good chance of getting it. All that is going on now and the last copy of the Roar calls us the mermaids. Can you realize, Janet, that it is actually February now, and of our senior year? When you write, tell me everything about all of them in our old class in Buxton High now, and some of them dropped out, I know, and some I don’t know at all that have come in since I left.

“To go back a little, we had all the lovely Christmas season as usual, with the customary carolling and gift making and looking after our poor. I’m glad to think that now ‘Ramona Rose’ and her mother are happy as they can be before they have Ramon back, all cosy at the Murchison’s. The new Mrs. Murchison had been very glad to have Rose, for there was a change of butler and everybody, almost, after the countess went away.

“I have seen a good deal of Lucia Coletti. She is more or less lonesome without her mother there, but both parents were here at Christmas time and now they are in South America. The count is a great traveler, but has his wife with him this time. Lucia is doing splendid work in her lessons and they are so proud of her!

“To tell the truth, I suppose the things we think about most are lessons, getting them and how to find time to get them! But I don’t know that they are the main objects in life! Wouldn’t you find it interesting to have me quote a page of Virgil, or give you extracts from my last English theme! After the Christmas parties we buckled down to work again, and we have recently survived the ‘mid years.’

“It certainly was hard to keep up my work the first semester, but I concentrated on the main things, and then it did help having Chet Dorrance and the other boys we know so well busy with their freshman work in the university! Well, some of them went away to school, too—other colleges. There wasn’t much social life till the holidays—a few parties and meeting each other at games and so on. I am still on the honor roll. I wouldn’t dare drop down from that, or Father would have me drop some other things. Anyhow, there is only one way for me to study and that is to get the work. We still have Latin and Math and other clubs, but the meetings for the most part are in the class period, so that isn’t so bad. They are interesting, too. I shudder to think how many of my different activities will be listed in our year book that will be published the end of the year. I’m on that staff, too, but I haven’t much to do yet. A teacher has it in charge, for it is too important to trust it altogether to our ignorance!

“But oh, Janet, we are growing up! Yes, the report was true about Mathilde and Jack Huxley. Mathilde wears a big diamond and they are always together. Mathilde is very snippy to me, a little more so than ever, and I can’t imagine why, unless it is because Jack started out by being quite attentive to me last year, for just a little while, you know. I gave you a hint of that affair—which you must not breathe to any one—ever! Mathilde and Jack are both a little older than the average of our class and the latest is that they are to be married soon after they graduate, with a big wedding, and go abroad for their wedding trip. Jack has only part work with us this year and is doing something at the university, too. But he told me himself that he did not want ‘any more school.’

“You ask me about ‘love affairs,’ but I gasped when I read what you wrote about Jo’s being so attentive. Was it to prepare me? ‘Janet and Jo,’ I said to myself. I haven’t seen Jo for so long that I probably would not know him. If he is going so far away he will probably want a pledge from you before he leaves. It looks like a good opportunity for him. I couldn’t tell from what you wrote just how you felt about it yourself. If this keeps on you will have to decide whether you want to be engaged or not and whether you like Jo enough. As I read your letter, I could remember the row of heads in the family pew in church, toward the front, and Jo’s was the highest up, among the three Clark boys. He was ‘one of the big boys’ to me after we began to go to school.

“And now telling you ‘EVERYTHING’ doesn’t seem to be so much, after re-reading your letter again and thinking about how little I really have to tell. I was in what Mother calls an ‘expansive’ mood when I began this letter and as it’s been written in ‘hitches’ it seems to be more or less of a boiled down record of what has happened. And on second thoughts it seems silly to write down some things, that I should probably blather about if I saw you. You will probably like to hear about the boys that I wrote of last summer in my long letter from Maine. Chet was pretty nice. I do like him ever so much, Janet, but he knows that I’ll not stand for anything sentimental, at least yet, and all he does is to take as many dates as he has time for and, I imagine, keep an eye on me. I don’t really know, Janet, that Chet himself thinks of any permanent arrangement between us. I’d be very conceited, I think, to suppose that any boy is very much in earnest when he hasn’t said so—yet Chet has been a friend for so long that there may be a little excuse for being on guard to ward off anything else. I certainly haven’t the least idea how to handle it, if it needs handling at all—for Chet is going clear through college somewhere.

“Father says to me, ‘Please, daughter, no high school engagement.’ I suppose I agree with him that his ideas are always sensible. Probably I am too young to know how to choose a ‘life partner.’ Still, he and Mother weren’t awfully old. They can’t say much. And if a certain person should ask me—well, it might be a little hard to refuse! I’m ‘going on’ eighteen, after all. Father says, if I want to go, he will give me a year in a girls’ college somewhere. But that takes a long time to arrange ahead, so I think it will be the ‘home town’ university at first.

“Oh, yes, I started in to tell you about the boys. No, I can’t tell who that ‘certain person’ is. Besides, I might change my mind. Ted, the boy that impressed me so when I first came to the city, is still a dear but does not figure in my dreams any more at all. He is just as fine a boy as could be, but he likes too many girls and I have to be the one and only! I think that Chet is less—temperamental, as they say. But nobody can help loving Ted.

“Larry Waite, about whom I’ve told you a little at different times, is very much of a gentleman, adores the water, just as I do and seemed to find me a congenial spirit this summer. That doesn’t mean a thing, however. I had one little note from him after I came home and perhaps I’ll have a valentine from him and from Chet on Valentine’s day, coming so soon now. He is Marcella’s brother, you remember, but isn’t home much because he has been East to school. But like me, he will be graduated this June and I don’t know what he is to do after that. We didn’t talk about it last summer.

“Arthur Penrose is in art school and writes to me once in a while. Chet didn’t like it much when I showed him a letter from Arthur, so I never showed him any more! The Penroses live here, you know, so it’s perfectly natural for us girls to see Archie and Arthur once in a while. Gwen we see every school day and some more!

“I shall have to hurry this up, though I’m not half through. Yet it’s a book already! I’ll try not to be so long again in getting to a letter. Yes—we have a Valentine Party—well, I’ll write you a card at least after that is over. I want to mail this tomorrow morning on the way to school, or give it to Father to mail for me, and Mother says I positively must go to bed now!

“Please tell me if anything has happened in your young life and I will do better next time.”

With the usual affectionate close, Betty finished her closely scribbled sheets and put them in an envelope. It was something to have gotten off so long a letter in the intervals of one afternoon and evening.