Chapter XVI: Letters

From Mrs. Edwin Green to Mrs. Kent Brown, New York City.

MEETING STREET,
CHARLESTON, S. C.,
April .., 19...

MY DEAREST JUDY:

No doubt you and Kent will be astonished to find
that Edwin and I are actually on the long
talked-of trip to this wonderful old city. Mother
is taking care of little Mildred in our absence,
and Dr. McLean is to be called if she sneezes or
coughs or does anything in the least out of the
way. She is such a blooming, rosy baby, and so
thoroughly normal that I am sure it is perfectly
safe to leave her. Mother says she is more like
Kent than any of her babies.

Charleston is more delightful even than it has
been pictured. We only got here yesterday morning,
and already we love it as though we belonged here.
We went to a hotel for one night, but by rare good
chance have found board in one of the real old
Charleston homes.

You will laugh when I tell you that after an
acquaintance of about twenty-four hours I find
myself the chaperone of three girls about
seventeen years old. I know you and Kent are
grinning and saying to each other: "Some more of
Molly's lame ducks!" but I can assure you they are
as far from being that as any girls you ever saw.
They are the Tucker twins, Dum and Dee, otherwise
known as Virginia and Caroline, and their friend,
Page Allison--all from Virginia. They have come
down here with Mr. Tucker, the father of the
twins, a newspaper man from Richmond, but he has
had to go to Columbia on his paper's business and
I volunteered to look after the girls in his
absence. He is a delightful man, and he and Edwin
are already Greening and Tuckering each other,
which means that they struck up quite a
friendship. He is the most absurdly young person
to be the father of these strapping twins. He
looks younger than Edwin, but I fancy he must be a
little older. You know Edwin's "high forehead"
makes him look older than he is.

The Tucker twins are bright, handsome, generous,
original--everything you like to see in young
girls. Their mother died when they were tiny
babies and their young father has had the raising
of them. A pretty good job he has made of it, too,
although he declares he has done nothing toward
bringing them up but just remove obstacles. They
call their father Zebedee, because of the old joke
about "Who's the father of Zebedee's children?"
They say nobody ever believes he is their father.
Dum is most artistic, wants to be a sculptor. She
hopes to study in New York next winter. Dee is as
fond of lame ducks as you used to say I was, and
may make a trained nurse of herself, or perhaps a
veterinary surgeon.

Their friend, Page Allison, is a delightful girl.
She is the daughter of a country doctor, and has
been the twins' room-mate at boarding school. By
the way, these girls had heard of you, and me too,
from Mattie Ball, who has been teaching them
English literature at Gresham. (Mattie had been
most complimentary to us both, so they have an
exalted idea of us.) Page is lots of fun. She is
in for anything that is going, but at the same
time acts as a kind of balance wheel for the
twins, who are a harum-scarum pair. Page has a
writing bee in her bonnet, which of course appeals
to me. You would have been amused to see both of
us whip out our notebooks to take down things that
we did not want to forget. Mr. Tucker is evidently
very much interested in this little girl, more
interested than he knows himself, and she is
perfectly unconscious of his feeling in any way
differently from the way he feels for his own
daughters. I may be mistaken, however. I know when
one is so happily married as I am it is a great
temptation to be constantly match-making.

I fancy you and Kent are wondering why I should
go to as interesting a place as Charleston and
then find nothing to write about but three
schoolgirls. Charleston is thrilling indeed, but
you know I always did think more of people than
things. We are seeing the sights very
thoroughly--have deciphered every inscription on
the old tombstones in three cemeteries, and are
going tomorrow to Magnolia Cemetery. They say
there is the most wonderful old live oak tree
there in the world.

Now that we are settled in a boarding-house, kept
by two old befo'-the-war ladies, we may stay here
quite a little while. Edwin needs this rest that
the Easter recess fortunately offered him.

I wish I could picture these old ladies to you,
but they are too wonderful to try to describe.
Whistler's mother does not belong in the frame in
which her artist son placed her any more than
these ladies belong in this old house. They hate
boarders. You can see it in spite of their
punctilious manners and old-world courtesy. I
believe we are the first they have had, and if
they only knew how much nicer we are than most
boarders, I fancy they would not hate us quite so
much. Mother always says that being a boarder
changes one's whole nature--the gentlest and most
generous becoming stern and exacting. At any rate,
Edwin and I have not been boarders long enough to
become very hateful, and these three girls could
board forever and never become professionals in
that line.

Please write to me soon. I am so glad Kent's firm
won the competition for that great hotel. Tell him
it is too bad I can't be there to tell him where
the closets ought to be and which way the doors
should open. He and I never agree on these points,
you remember. It is splendid that you keep up your
painting. I have no patience with these persons
who insist that a career and matrimony cannot go
hand in hand. Of course my little Mildred is very
engrossing, but I do not intend to let her take
every moment of the day and night. I find if I am
going to write, however, that I cannot sew, but
you know sewing was never one of my strong points.
Giving it up is like Huck Finn's giving up
stealing green persimmons. If occasionally, and
only occasionally, I can persuade a magazine to
see how worth printing one of my stories is, and I
can make an honest penny that way, it is surely no
extravagance to get someone to make Mildred's
little clothes and to buy mine ready-made.

But Edwin is rearing and champing for me to go
walking with him, and I must also look up these
dear girls I am chaperoning, so good-by, my dear
sister-in-law. My best love to "that 'ere Kent,"
as Aunt Mary used to call him. Poor old Aunt Mary!
How we shall miss her!

Yours with all the love in the world,
MOLLY BROWN GREEN.

To Dr. James Allison, Milton, Va., from Page Allison.

MEETING STREET,
CHARLESTON, S. C.

MY DEAREST FATHER:

I can't get over how good it was in you to let me
go tripping with the Tuckers. It has been a
wonderful experience, and we are having the most
gorgeous time. Already, of course, we have plunged
into adventures, as is always the case if you
train with the Tucker twins. I am not going to
tell you of these adventures until I come back to
Bracken; they are too thrilling for mere pen and
ink.

As you see by the above address, we have left the
hotel and are now installed in a boarding-house on
Meeting Street. It seems absurd to call such a
place a boarding-house--indeed, a sacrilege. It
has just become a boarding-house in the last
twelve hours, as I am sure we are the first
"paying guests" the poor Misses Laurens have ever
had.

We are being chaperoned by a perfectly lovely
young woman, a Mrs. Edwin Green. She and her
husband were at the hotel and we scraped up an
acquaintance with them, and as Mr. Tucker had to
go over to Columbia on business she offered to
look after us while he was away. Tweedles and I
have not been chaperoned before to any great
extent, as Miss Cox was our one experience, and
we think chaperones are pretty nice, lots nicer
than we had been led to expect. Certainly no one
could be more charming than Miss Cox, unless it
were this lovely Mrs. Green. In the first place,
she is so sympathetic, then she is so kind, then
she is so pretty, then she is so intelligent and
so extremely well-bred,--on top of it all she has
married one of the nicest men I ever saw; he
really is almost as nice as Mr. Tucker and you. (I
should have said you and Mr. Tucker, but you were
an afterthought, as you well know!)

Afterthought or not, I do wish you were here, my
dearest father. You would delight in the
quaintness of this old city. I am getting all the
postal cards I can find, which I will not send
you, but will bring you, and make you sit down and
listen to me while I tell you all about it. I am
also going to bring you a volume of Henry Timrod's
poetry, which you must duly appreciate, as it was
difficult to find it. It seems that although the
South Carolinians are very proud of him, none of
them have seen fit to get out a new edition of
his poetry, and the old editions are very
expensive. This I was told by the very pleasant
man who has opened a second-hand book shop here.

I found a book there I was crazy to get for you,
but as it was a first edition, and that a limited
one, I could not afford it. By an amusing chance
it has since become my property. I will tell you
about that some day. It is entitled "Purely
Original Verse," by J. Gordon Coogler. He, too,
was a South Carolinian, and such ridiculous stuff
you have never imagined. The kind man who owned
the shop let me copy a few of the poems before I
dreamed of possessing the book. What do you think
of these?

A COUPLET

Alas for the South, her books have grown fewer--
She was never much given to literature.

BYRON

Oh! thou immortal bard!
Men may condemn the song
That issued from thy heart sublime,
Yet alas! its music sweet
Has left an echo that will sound
Thro' the lone corridors of time.

Thou immortal Byron!
Thy inspired genius
Let no man attempt to smother--
May all that was good within thee
Be attributed to Heaven,
All that was evil--to thy mother.

A PRETTY GIRL

On her beautiful face there are smiles of grace
That linger in beauty serene,
And there are no pimples encircling her dimples
As ever, as yet, I have seen.

But, father dear, do not be too hard on this bard,
or you will come under this ban:

Oh, jealous heart that seeks to belittle my gentle muse,
And blow your damnable bugle in my lonely ears;
You'll lie some day in expressing your recognition
Of this very song you disowned in other years.

Surely you must have sympathy for the person who
could write the following stanza, especially when
your only child goes tripping with the Tuckers
when she ought to be down in the country with her
old father:

I feel like some lone deserted lad,
Standing on the shore of life's great ocean,
Casting pebbles in its billows, as if to excite
Some past emotion.

Please give Mammy Susan my dearest love. I wish
she could see the flower gardens down here. They
are very wonderful. Every house almost has
porch-boxes, and no place is too poor or mean to
have some bright flowers around it. We went
through some real slummy parts yesterday where no
one but darkies lived; beautiful old
foreign-looking houses that have belonged in days
gone by to the wealthy. I don't believe a single
window was without flowers. They were growing in
tomato cans and old broken jars and pots, but
flowers don't mind what they are in just so the
people who plant them love them and know how to
attend to them. They seemed to me to be making a
braver show than they do when they boast brass
jardinieres.

I can't help thinking what Cousin Park Garnett
would say if she knew that Mr. Tucker had left us
alone in Charleston with a perfectly strange lady
to chaperone us. I reckon she would throw about a
million aristocratic fits.

I don't know how long we will be here. It will
depend on Mr. Tucker. I think he needs a rest. He
seems to me to be not quite himself. I have
noticed that he is in a way irascible. That, you
know, is not like him, as there never was but one
better tempered man in all the world. You see, you
were not an afterthought this time, but came
first.

I must stop now without telling you about the dear
ladies where we are boarding. They are like rare
editions of old forgotten poetry, or odd pieces of
china no one has used for generations but has kept
in a cabinet until one has forgotten whether they
are meant for tea or coffee. They are very
dignified with us, but I have a notion that the
Tucker twins will be able to limber 'em up by hook
or crook. I saw the younger one almost smile when
Dee took her cat in her arms.

Your devoted daughter,
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