City and town life -- Fiction; Diary fiction; Girls -- Fiction; Love stories, American
I haven't seen Jean since she was down here, but we write eighteen
pages a week. I didn't get to go on my visit to her house as I
expected, for we went to Florida instead. We all went, that is, us
three, and Waterloo and his family besides Ann Lisbeth and Doctor
Gordon.
Doctor Gordon was the one that started it. He caught pneumonia one
dreary day in the early spring when he was already sick in bed, but
got up and went out to the hospital to operate for appendicitis. Ann
Lisbeth almost went into catalepsy, trying to keep him from going,
but it was a very expensive appendix, he said, so he got up and went
out and bottled it. The changing from his warm room to the cold air
gave him pneumonia, although the doctors say it is caused by a germ.
I'll never believe this, not even if I marry one!
Well, he finally got over his spell by "lysis" instead of "crisis,"
but I hope this will never come to Mammy Lou's ears, or she will
fairly long for more twins in the Dovie family.
When Doctor Gordon got able to be out a little all the other doctors
told him that he had better go to a warm climate for a month or two,
for it was still so cold, so he and Ann Lisbeth persuaded Rufe and
Cousin Eunice to go too, and they all wrote for us to hurry up and get
ready so we could go with them.
Mother said she'd just _love_ to go, but she didn't see how we
possibly could, for none of us had any clothes and she had always
heard that Florida was fairly alive with rich Yankees! Mammy Lou
spoke up then and said, well, she was sure Ann looked exactly like a
rich Yankee, and she was the only one that folks was going to look at
anyhow! So mother took heart and we went.
Father had to have a new overcoat, for the weather has been colder
this spring than ever the oldest inhabitant can tell about, and as
they wrote us to get ready in such a hurry, on account of poor Doctor
Gordon's cough, he didn't have time to have one made at his regular
place, so he bought one ready-made, a light tan one, the poor dear!
And it had two long "heimer" names from Chicago printed on the label
at the collar.
We got ready in such a rush that none of us had time to rip this label
out, though I lived to regret it many a time! It was too hot to wear
it when we got down there, but father had got scared up about catching
pneumonia, so he insisted on carrying it around on his arm all the
time, inside out; and there was not one millionaire, not one tennis
champion, nor famous authoress we met, but what I saw the eyes of
fixed, at one time or another, on those "heimer" names!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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