19th December
Dear Daddy-Long-Legs,

You never answered my question and it was very important.

ARE YOU BALD?


I have it planned exactly what you look like--very satisfactorily--
until I reach the top of your head, and then I AM stuck. I can\'t
decide whether you have white hair or black hair or sort of sprinkly
grey hair or maybe none at all.

Here is your portrait:

But the problem is, shall I add some hair?

Would you like to know what colour your eyes are? They\'re grey,
and your eyebrows stick out like a porch roof (beetling, they\'re
called in novels), and your mouth is a straight line with a tendency
to turn down at the corners. Oh, you see, I know! You\'re a snappy
old thing with a temper.
(Chapel bell.)
9.45 p.m.

I have a new unbreakable rule: never, never to study at night no matter
how many written reviews are coming in the morning. Instead, I read
just plain books--I have to, you know, because there are eighteen
blank years behind me. You wouldn\'t believe, Daddy, what an abyss
of ignorance my mind is; I am just realizing the depths myself.
The things that most girls with a properly assorted family and a home
and friends and a library know by absorption, I have never heard of.
For example:

I never read Mother Goose or David Copperfield or Ivanhoe or
Cinderella or Blue Beard or Robinson Crusoe or Jane Eyre or Alice
in Wonderland or a word of Rudyard Kipling. I didn\'t know that Henry
the Eighth was married more than once or that Shelley was a poet.
I didn\'t know that people used to be monkeys and that the Garden
of Eden was a beautiful myth. I didn\'t know that R. L. S. stood
for Robert Louis Stevenson or that George Eliot was a lady.
I had never seen a picture of the `Mona Lisa\' and (it\'s true but you
won\'t believe it) I had never heard of Sherlock Holmes.

Now, I know all of these things and a lot of others besides,
but you can see how much I need to catch up. And oh, but it\'s fun!
I look forward all day to evening, and then I put ............