Friday, March 5Dear Sister:
Uh-huh! The fair damsel with your yarn in her fist showed up this forenoon, and I told her that I had assassinated my conscience and was going to do the best I could for the grand old institution.
However, the assassination wasn't complete, because I think there's some readable entertainment to be derived from the yarn, though it will make you madder'n everything when you see the ghastly work I made of it. I'll mail you a clipping of it if it gets in, and the make-up man has been told it was as near "must stuff" as anything short of advertising or real news.
I thought you made a very good newspaper yarn of it, for papers where it is local news sufficiently to call for straight news treatment. Down here, of course, that isn't the case, so I took the liberty of pointing the moral that when college profs are so seriously devoted to a cause that they'll make darn fools of themselves for the students' benefit, there must be something in it. That introduces merely the monkey-shine element as the theme. I judge you saw that this was its only salvation here when you added the page about Rintintin et amie. I should think your version ought to go straight in papers up that way, or in Boston.
The kid who called here today said that Mount Holyoke, Smith, B-Mawr and possibly some others of the women's institutions had pooled their issues in this State, which seems eminently sensible. Have you noticed the Cornell advertising campaign for its endowment? That, really, is the scientific and economical way to do it, and newspaper men are commenting on the difference. My personal belief is that it is really economical. I shudder to think what is going to happen to us when Brown gets its campaign going, unless it uses a little more judgment. As a sample of the kind of thing that we have to hire an extra man to open and throw away nowadays I enclose this about the hen. If you haven't seen it, you may be entertained.
Thank you bokoo for the contribution to our columns, and I hope you won't detonate with wrath when you see it. Sorry we don't pay space rates for boost literature.
Don't work too hard.
W S [Walter Savage Ball, Margaret's brother]
Oh no! In view of the things I did to your story, I didn't use your name on it. Don't worry. Your literary reputation is still intact.
W S