Page:When You Write a Letter (1922).pdf/62

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top down, and the size of the envelope in this case is four by seven and a half inches; or it may be folded into a double sheet five and a quarter by seven and a quarter inches, in which case the envelope is three and three-fourths by five and three-fourths inches. The single sheet eight and one-half by five and one-half inches which comes made up into blocks is not a good form to use. It suggests crude inexperience. No extreme shades will do for this sort of letter-writing, if one wishes to be thought to have good taste. White is the best, though soft shades of gray are permissible.

"Wonder what his correspondence is like?" Mrs. Cheveley asks of Lord Goring in Oscar Wilde's An Ideal Husband. And then as she looks at the letters, "Oh, what a very uninteresting correspondence! Who on earth writes to him on pink paper? How silly to write on pink paper! It looks like the beginning of a middle-class romance."

It looks, in fact, in these days like a sentimental child of fourteen. Many people never change the size or quality or shade of the paper on which they conduct their social correspondence. There is a certain individual personal touch