Judith looked at the outside of her mother's and sister's letters. Sibyl's interested her most; and she looked them all through carefully, numerous though they were. Why does one look at the directions on other people's letters? So Judith thought to herself, as she got disgusted with the monotony of the text on Sibyl's, and her inability to suggest any emendations. She was very honourable, for she read nothing but a signature or two on the numerous postcards. She was, in fact, only acting under the impulse which prompts the least inquisitive of us all, when we have undertaken to post a letter for a friend, to read the address upon it carefully before we insert it into the inexorable box, and feel inside to see that it hasn't stuck. Judith did not answer the question she asked herself; yet her reading of the same address again and again called more for explanation than that of the letter-poster; for the latter may be put on his oath in the end, if a letter fails to reach.
There were so many to "Miss Sybil Arkroyd" that she had become confused over the spelling of the name by the time its owner's footstep was heard on the stairs. However, she wasn't going to pretend she hadn't been reading them. "There's one for you from Betty Inglis," she said incidentally; and picking up her own letters from the table, took them with her to read by the fire. It was a morning to make the hardiest give in to the temptation of a hundred-weight of best Wallsend, blazing. Judith enjoyed it; so much so that a sense of a russet Liberty serge, baking, crept into the atmosphere as she sought in vain for an inlet into an envelope cruelly gummed to its uttermost corner. When will envelope-makers have compassion for their customers' correspondents?
"You're scorching, Ju. Or you will be directly." So spoke Sibyl, reading a letter attentively, and speaking through her absorption as to a world without. "Who was that?... No--don't make the tea yet, Elphinstone. Coffee for me. You're coffee, I suppose, Ju?..."
"Who was that in your cab last night?... Well, you made noise enough! Of course I could hear! I'm not deaf." The letter is read by now, being short, and Sibyl has come out into the world to hear the answer to her question.