Dear Enemy (Daddy-Long-Legs, #2)

by Jean Webster

We weren't trying to force them into college if they hadn't any brains, as happens with rich men's sons; and we weren't putting them to work at fourteen if they were naturally ambitious, as happens with poor men's sons. We were watching them closely and individually and discovering their level. If our children showed an aptitude to become farm laborers and nurse-maids, we were going to teach them to be the best possible farm laborers and nurse-maids; and if they showed a tendency to become lawyers, we would turn them into honest, intelligent, open-minded lawyers.

Aren't men funny? When they want to pay you the greatest compliment in their power, they naively tell you that you have a masculine mind. There is one compliment, incidentally, that I shall never be paying him. I cannot honestly say that he has a quickness of perception almost feminine.

Children who have spirit enough to be bad I consider very hopeful. It's those who are good just from inertia that are discouraging.

Really, Judy, I am growing frightened. This asylum will get me if I stay long enough. I am becoming so interested in it that I can't think or talk or dream of anything else. You and Jervis have blasted all my prospects in life.

And do find me some sports who are not afraid of heredity. This wanting every child to come from one of the first families of Virginia is getting tiresome.

I am separating him from the other kindergarten children, and trying the Montessori method of a private rug and no nervous distraction.

If you had started me with a modern asylum, equipped with nice, clean, hygienic cottages and everything in running order, I couldn't have stood the monotony of its perfect clockwork. It's the sight of so many things crying to be done that makes it possible for me to stay.

Isn't it funny how the nicest men often choose the worst wives, and the nicest women the worst husbands? Their very niceness, I suppose, makes them blind and unsuspicious.

She ticks off questions with the steady persistency of an eight-day clock.

The awful thing about a vacation is that the moment it begins your happiness is already clouded by its approaching end.

You'd think I must have a dash of Creole or Spanish or some warm blood in me somewhere, but I'm nothing on earth but a chilly mixture of English and Irish and Scotch. Perhaps that is why I hear the South calling. "The palm dreams of the pine, and the pine of the palm."

But he wasn't very wonderful when he came home to her—only when he had an audience and applause. He would drink with every casual acquaintance, and be gay and bubbling and expansive; and then return morose and sullen and down. "Joie de rue, douleur de maison," is the burden of the book.

positively don't know what the word "forgiving" means. It can't include "forgetting," for that is a physiological process, and does not result from an act of the will. We all have a collection of memories that we would happily lose, but somehow those are just the ones that insist upon sticking. If "forgiving" means promising never to speak of a thing again, I can doubtless manage that. But it isn't always the wisest way to shut an unpleasant memory inside you. It grows and grows, and runs all through you like a poison.

I believe that every institution ought to be burned to the ground every twenty-five years in order to get rid of old-fashioned equipment and obsolete ideas.

Do you remember when we read Huxley's letters our senior year? That book contained a phrase which has stuck in my memory ever since: "There is always a Cape Horn in one's life that one either weathers or wrecks oneself on." It's terribly true; and the trouble is that you can't always recognize your Cape Horn when you see it. The sailing is sometimes pretty foggy, and you're wrecked before you know it.

The girl he loves is not the ME I want to be. It's the ME I've been trying to grow away from all this last year. I'm not sure she ever really existed.

I think that such a spectacle as you and Jervis is a menace to society. You look so happy and peaceful and companionable that you induce a defenseless onlooker to rush off and snap up the first man she meets—and he's always the wrong man.