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Daddy-Long-Legs by Jean Webster
page 18 of 159 (11%)
is to turn the ninety-seven orphans into ninety-seven twins.

The unusual artistic ability which I exhibit was developed at an early
age through drawing chalk pictures of Mrs. Lippett on the woodshed door.

I hope that I don't hurt your feelings when I criticize the home
of my youth? But you have the upper hand, you know, for if I become
too impertinent, you can always stop payment of your cheques.
That isn't a very polite thing to say--but you can't expect me
to have any manners; a foundling asylum isn't a young ladies'
finishing school.

You know, Daddy, it isn't the work that is going to be hard in college.
It's the play. Half the time I don't know what the girls are
talking about; their jokes seem to relate to a past that every one
but me has shared. I'm a foreigner in the world and I don't understand
the language. It's a miserable feeling. I've had it all my life.
At the high school the girls would stand in groups and just look at me.
I was queer and different and everybody knew it. I could FEEL
`John Grier Home' written on my face. And then a few charitable
ones would make a point of coming up and saying something polite.
I HATED EVERY ONE OF THEM--the charitable ones most of all.

Nobody here knows that I was brought up in an asylum. I told
Sallie McBride that my mother and father were dead, and that a kind
old gentleman was sending me to college which is entirely true
so far as it goes. I don't want you to think I am a coward,
but I do want to be like the other girls, and that Dreadful Home
looming over my childhood is the one great big difference.
If I can turn my back on that and shut out the remembrance, I think,
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