It arrived, I remember, at breakfast. I turned it over, in the idle way one does when time goes slowly and every event must be spun out to its full extent. It was, I saw, a local letter with a typewritten address.

I opened it before the two with London postmarks, since one of them was a bill and the other from a rather tiresome cousin.

Inside, printed words and letters had been cut out and gummed to a sheet of paper. For a minute or two I stared at the words without taking them in. Then I gasped.

Joanna, who was frowning over some bills, looked up.

“Hallo,” she said, “what is it? You look quite startled.”

The letter, using terms of the coarsest character, expressed the writer’s opinion that Joanna and I were not brother and sister.

“It’s a particularly foul anonymous letter,” I said.

I was still suffering from shock. Somehow one didn’t expect that kind of thing in the placid backwater of Lymstock.

Joanna at once displayed lively interest.

“No? What does it say?”

In novels, I have noticed, anonymous letters of a foul and disgusting character are never shown, if possible, to women. It is implied that women must at all cost be shielded from the shock it might give their delicate nervous systems.

I am sorry to say it never occurred to me not to show the letter to Joanna. I handed it to her at once.

She vindicated my belief in her toughness by displaying no emotion but that of amusement.

“What an awful bit of dirt! I’ve always heard about anonymous letters, but I’ve never seen one before. Are they always like this?”

“I can’t tell you,” I said. “It’s my first experience, too.”

Joanna began to giggle.

“You must have been right about my makeup, Jerry. I suppose they think I just must be an abandoned female!”

“That,” I said, “coupled with the fact that our father was a tall, dark lantern-jawed man and our mother a fair-haired blue-eyed little creature, and that I take after him and you take after her.”

Joanna nodded thoughtfully.

“Yes, we’re not a bit alike. Nobody would take us for brother and sister.”

“Somebody certainly hasn’t,” I said with feeling.

Joanna said she thought it was frightfully funny.

She dangled the letter thoughtfully by one corner and asked what we were to do with it.

“The correct procedure, I believe,” I said, “is to drop it into the fire with a sharp exclamation of disgust.”

I suited the action to the word, and Joanna applauded.

“You did that beautifully,” she added. “You ought to have been on the stage. It’s lucky we still have fires, isn’t it?”

“The wastepaper basket would have been much less dramatic,” I agreed. “I could, of course, have set light to it with a match and slowly watched it burn—or watched it slowly burn.”

“Things never burn when you want them to,” said Joanna. “They go out. You’d probably have had to strike match after match.”