MOLLY RANDOLPH TO HER FATHER
rand Hotel, Toulon
December 20.
My Wingless Angel,
It's lucky your poor dear hair is getting conspicuous by its absence, or it would stand up on end, I don't doubt, when you read a few lines farther. So, you see, even baldness is a blessing in disguise.
I won't keep you in suspense. The worst shall come first; after all that's happened I don't mind such a little thing as an anticlimax in writing to my indulgent and uncritical Dad.
Now for it.
I have deserted Aunt Mary and Jimmy Payne in a gorge. I am alone in a hotel—with Brown. Yet I ask you to suspend judgment; I have not exactly eloped.
It is all Jimmy Payne's fault.
I wired you yesterday from Marseilles, because I hadn't written since my second letter from Pau, when I told you how Aunt Mary had persuaded me that it would be perfectly caddish not to invite Jimmy to drive with us to the Riviera, as his car was there and he was going that way. I felt in my bones to an almost rheumatic extent that to ask him would be a big mistake; still, in a weak moment I
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