Our Square was a dimmer and duller place after she left. But her letters
helped. They were so exactly like herself! Even at the first, when
things seemed to be going ill with her, they were all courage, and
quaint humor and determination to get well and come back to Our Square,
which was the dearest and best place in the world with the dearest and
best people in it. Homesickness! Poor little, lonely Mayme. She was
reading--she wrote the Bonnie Lassie--all the books that the Dominie had
listed for her, and she was being tutored by a school-teacher with blue
goggles and a weak heart who lived at the same resort. "Why grow up a
Boob," wrote the philosophic Mayme, "when the lil old world is full of
wise guys just aking to spill their wiseness?"
Contemporaneously the Weeping Scion of Wealth was writing back his views
on life and the emptiness thereof, in better orthography, but with
distinctly less of spirit.
"It appears," reported the Little Red Doctor, "that every man in his own
company has licked our young friend and now the other companies of the
regiment are beginning to show interest, and he doesn't like it. I
believe he'd desert if it weren't that he's afraid of what Mayme
would think."
"Still on his mind, is she?" I asked.
The Little Red Doctor produced a letter with a camp postmark from the
South and read a passage:
"You were right when you guessed that I never wanted anything very much
before, without having it handed to me.
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