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290 Walnut Street
Stoughton, Mass.
March 9, 1947

Dear folks,

You ought to be here now. From this front chamber window I can see Charlie's perfectly polished black car. Downstairs: Mrs. Barry's loud, indignant (so it always sounds at a distance, no matter what she's saying) voice, Mrs. Wentworth's high, grand [[strikethrough]] stam [[/strikethrough]] stream of emphatic opinion, Charlie's sporadic booms of argument with everything said, and now Grandma's soft but determined steps on the stairs away from it. Charlie greeted me with big, rolling eyes; his wife hung a limp hand ("Pardon me for not getting up; I'm so [[underlined]] old [[/underlined]]." As a matter of fact she has a reasonably young face, a tongue not out of exercise, certainly not brittle). Grandma got  a very good hit in (remarkable woman!) by, when Mrs. W. began to examine your picture (with Dad on beach), telling of how you refused the fellow from California even when you were  aware of his father's fortune in order to marry Dad (Don't know whether Charlie's rolled eyes expressed worry or not). I could say a lot more about them, but haven't time.

What seemed to predict an awful mess has luckily been cut short: Mrs. Barry before breakfast this morning was [[strikethrough]] f [[/strikethrough]] fairly yelling that she was going to leave here this instant, the last straw being my "6 o'clock uprisal" (the' I wasn't up 'til 7:15). [[strikethrough]] You sh [[/strikethrough]] It would have done the church good to hear her refraint from profanity (she only used the words "dog"