Dart’s letter is a sad liitle thing, written in pencil because he lost his pen when he was transported to sick bay on a stretcher! This poor guy can’t catch a break. He has been diagnosed with catharral fever and will need at least four days in bed. He sounds sick and tired of being sick and tired.
“I’ll be a heck of a sailor when I leave this place. I’m missing half my classes, I’m not learning any of the hand-to-hand fighting, I’m not even getting much marching practice, since I must call the steps, give commands and watch for mistakes.”
It’s taken him all day to write this short letter. He says he’d rater be whispering things in her ear than writing. He writes that he is almost glad he didn’t have his boot camp leave yet because he’d have nothing to look forward to. He adds wistfully, “If it already happened, no one knows when I’d be seeing you and my family again.” He closes with the statement “It’s less than a month now ’til I can see you again.” Is it?
Dot writes a long letter from study hall – permitted because her exams are over and her new semester has not yet begun.
She describes in gruesome detail the long, arduous, challenging exams she just survived. I find it interesting that her academic load was so strenuous because Andrews was more or less a vocational school for young ladies. She seems to have received a pretty good education there.
She and three other students have taken their turn on cook duty. Because they are all such terrible cooks, Dot wrote a little ditty, which her co-cooks typed up to put at everyone’s place for dinner. In typical Dot style, the poem is witty and self-depricating!
She talks about the upcoming prom (she’s not going) and his pending visit home (she’s eagerly counting the days). She vows to never return to her man-hating ways – after all, there’s Ronald Coleman, Walter Pidgeon and… (Does everyone still know that the two gentlemen she mentions were film actors?)
She writes that for the past two weeks she doesn’t know what she would have done without the morale boosting powers of his letters. She feels guilty that her letters to him were few and brief, but his got her though the dreary days of preparations for her exams. As a reward, she’s happy to say that she did okay on the tests.
She adds that Lois Cain (Dart’s official companion on that first group blind date), was a godsend to Dot when studying for chemistry. While she and Lois are not close, Dot credits Lois with great brains and a willingness to help pull Dot through the exam. Dot shamelessly suggests to Dart that he might have been better off to give Lois more of his time and attention. (Fishing for compliments, Dot?)
She mentions a box she has shipped to him and hopes it’s not all crumbs when he gets it.
