Stanford Student Letters and Memoirs

[written] p. 35 30

[typed] Friday Night - Dec. 11 - '96

My dearest Nannie -

The liberty scarf is a fleecy dream and I am perfectly delighted - Can scarcely wait till next Friday night when I can wear it to the Sigma Sigma party, except that is is such a cloud it ought to float and blow instead of being worn. Thank you so much. It came Wednesday and that night I put it under my pillow and waked up about a dozen times to see whether it was light enough to open the package, but it wasn't till about seven o'clock and then it was such fun! A letter camefrom Theordora, saying that when we were in town she would get me a pair of party slippers; and after dinner Thursday I found Gertrude waiting for me in my room. She had waited nearly an hour as I had gone to dinner without going to my room -(like a chump) she brought a delicious birthday cake, and such good mince pie (cooked with sherry, too) and some chickens & pickles & fruits so we had a jolly little feed. And then what do you suppose that dear child brought besides! And then what do you suppose that dear child brought besides! All the useful things a person could think of and just the things I was out of. A box of 4711 soap - and alchohol and shampoo and listerine, tooth powder, hair pins, face powder partly from dear Miss McKinion & from herself - Miss McKinnion sent a darling box of dress-up note paper( small size) with oceans of stamps and top of all this Gertrude disclosed to me her plan of making an eider down lounging robe for me. As I happen to be out of a corset, however, I fancy it will turn into an equopoise waisteinstead-- did you ever hear of such a practical birthday! And the joke of it was that everything came in so pat! Wasn't Gertrude an old darling?

The night before, Helen and I had been asked to dinner by Mrs. Peasly the woman who keeps the Palo Alto Home Bakery. She is an excellent cook and she is very anxious to get Roble Hall kitchen into her her hands next year. So she asked us to come & try her potatoes and her meat. We did so, all dressed in our best, and how we did eat & such good things - just a simple plain dinner of some awfully good meat, & potatoes & _____, pickles, jelly, celery, ice-cream & cake, but everything so ecstaticly good. She boards a number of boys and three out of the number came from San Jose & I had never heard of them. There was also a Greelyyouth who spoke to me of the Tuckermans who was there.

After dinner, Mrs. Peasly said her husband could put a back seat in the delivery wagon if we could wait till she did up the dishes & they would take us home; so one of the boys who is studying for the ministry & whom I always see in church, Helen in her silks, and I, wiped while she washed, and her little curly-headed, adopted, orphan boy sang us baby-songs. Then we came home in the back of their delivery wagon & waited for her to do an errant at the Hutchinsins who are the swellest people in Palo Alto and whose home life we had hardly dreamed, we would ever watch thru their cheery windows from such a unique conveyance. Wasn't that a birthday dinner forever to be remembered though?

To-morrow night Mrs. _____ ( the vice-president's wife) has invited all the upper classmen over to a card party - which I think will be jolly.

To-morrow Mr. Peet calls, he is very grateful for some little help I could do for him by getting up a bus to run from the Hall to the church Sundays at very reduced rates which came under my official duty as secretary & treasurer of St. Agnus guild.

I enjoy living alone so much, it is such an incentive to keep