ended with the words, "But it is after midnight, and I ought to be in bed instead," whether they were written at noon or at night.
Love letters! How absurd!
Letters which amuse the writer to write rarely fail to amuse the recipient to read. Pearl's letters, arriving as they did in bunches, amused him not only on account of their dashing style but on account of the contrast between this style and the pale demure little person he remembered. Anything written day by day gains a serial interest; and Anthony, without newspapers, waited for Pearl's letters as the great interest of life. He had never felt so intimate with his family as through her careful description of them. His sister, though a fairly regular correspondent, had to perfection the art of covering the paper with sentences which by the time they reached her correspondent meant nothing. "I did so wonder whether the preserved ginger I ordered for you had caught your steamer of if the man had mistaken the line—he seemed so stupid----" Pages like this, when he wanted to hear of the contemporary life of the children.
Yet this time the first sentence of his sister's letter interested him:
She arrived the day before yesterday--your priceless pearl--Antonia's idea of Helen of Troy. But do you think Helen
would have made a comfortable sort of governess? This young woman is entirely untrained--turns handsprings on the beach and goes shouting about the tennis courts in a