An Old Letter (An Anecdote)

★ One evening my sister and I were reading aloud passages from letters we had received from two young men we had come to know a short while before. My father pretended to be busy reading his newspaper, but he could not bear it long, and suddenly he burst out and said: "Good Lord! Deliver us from this drivel."

No sooner did my mother hear him than she dropped from her hands a shirt she was knitting and slipped gently out of the room, motioning to us to follow her. When we came back, my father was still muttering something about this generation of young people and its sins; so we told him that what was hidden from him was greater than what he knew, and my sister began to read a letter dripping with love and passion — beside which the letters we had read before would seem moderate, even cold.

My father shouted: "Never in my life have I heard drivel like this drivel, and I command you both to refrain from answering this letter." So we let him fume a little, then placed the letter in his hands — and behold, its date was the first of June, 1915, and it had been sent to my mother — by my father.