Dear Enemy

Did you ever know anything more appalling than this soul-crushing unreasoning obedience which Mrs. Lippett so insistently fostered? It’s the orphan-asylum attitude toward life, and somehow I must crush it out. Initiative, responsibility, curiosity, inventiveness, fight — oh dear! I wish the doctor had a serum for injecting all these useful virtues into an orphan’s circulation… 

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Sallie McBride -Judy's classmate- was chosen to be the superintendent of the John Grier Home, and you'd see that awful dreary place from within through her eyes. She wouldn't have accepted that position, if her suitor – the politician- hadn't made fun of her being in charge of 113 orphans, and put her competence down.