Now after boosting as if Iowa-Center-First-the -World-Afterwards Week was still on I hate to drop down to earth and tell yow that the hugest social diversion we had last week was a Spelling Bet. Now laugh and show your ignor-. ance! I knew you would. We are reviving a lot of things this fall besides hard cider and horse-shoe pitching contests and really this Spelling Bee was the jellyfish's first wisdom. tooth.
Everybody came in country school costumes, ginghams and overalls you know, and the new Chairman. of the Board of Educa. tion, Jed Simpson, called off the words. He allowed that was th: safest job to have because if he missed a word in the contest it would be bad for his official position. We had a lot of fun about it but almost required a Geneva Conferencee to settle the disputes between the conservatives and the left wing phonetic spellers. They are still joshing me because when they gave mo a sticker I just naturally shut my eyes and played it over on an imaginary typewriter before I could spell the word out loud.
That's what prolonged typing will do for you, and isn't it a bit startling to find one's brain centers transferred to one's fingers' tips? There, I've picked up that one' trick from you, Phyllis. I suppose you have to speak English in Shanghai in order to be understood, but you might keep up your American in your home letters, just for practice.
And speaking of letters,—I suppose you know Jack has gone off to San Francisco to take another bank position; he did n't know just where he would be located and said he expected to be too busy with his work and his sightseeing to write letters. Such an encouragement to correspondence that, much the same as "Do come in but the bull dog's loose in the front yard." All the same I don't hold that graciousness of manner up against Jack, but place the responsibility just where it belongs, viz, namely, and to wit on you. It's the snail's dress suit the way you. two keep up that quarrel when I belive you still have.a reserved section of your crowded heart for him, or else you'd have run true to tradition and married somebody in Shanghai long ago.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.