Page:When You Write a Letter (1922).pdf/37

 When I get such a letter from a mother the communication and the inquiry are generally accompanied with harrowing details of infantile disasters, which had undermined his health and made it difficult or impossible for him to do good work. There are accounts of his difficulties in teething, of the size and influence of his tonsils and adenoids, of the various physical struggles through which he has passed, and which have alf but wrecked him. There is the assurance always that if I could only appreciate his many virtues, how hard he has worked, how much he and all his family have worried about his mental progress, I should be more than ordinarily interested in him. And what she really wants to know is what chance he has of continuing in college, but she does not get at that without many and devious preliminary peregrinations.

I have before me now, from a woman, a letter which runs to two thousand words or more. It discusses in much incoherent detail various difficulties which she has had with her tenants, with her neighbors, and with a woman to whom she thought she had rented her house. I have read it over