August First | Page 9

at the free dispensary; the room was unspeakable--shut windows and a crowd of people. A woman, young, sat rocking back and forth, half smothering a baby in her arms. Nobody spoke. It took time to get the windows open and persuade the woman to lay the child on the bed in the corner. There wasn't anything else to use, so I fanned the baby with my straw hat--until, finally, it got away from North Baxter Court forever. Which was as it should be. Then tumult. Probably you are not in a position to know that few spectacles are more hideous than the unrestrained grief of the poor. The things they said and did--it was unhuman, indecent. I can't describe it. As I was leaving, after a pretty bad half hour, I met the doctor at the door--one of these half-drunken quacks who live on the ignorant. That child died of diphtheria. I knew it, and he admitted it. The funeral was this breathless morning, with details that may not be written down.
LATER.
Somebody interrupted. And now it's long past midnight. I must try to send you some answer to your letter. I have been thinking--the combination may strike you as odd--of North Baxter Court and you. Not that the happenings of yesterday were unusual. That is just it--they come almost every day, things like that. And you, with your birds and rustling trees and your lake--you keep a shiny pistol in the drawer of your dressing-table, and write me the sort of letter that came from you this morning. When all these people need you--these blind, dumb animals, stumbling through the sordid, hopeless years--need you, because, in spite of everything, you are still so much further along than they, because you are capable of seeing where their eyes are shut, because you and your kind can help them, and put the germ of life into the deadness of their days, because of all that makes you what you are, and gives you the chance to become infinitely more--you, in the face of all that, can sit down in the fragrance of a garden-scented breeze and write as you have done about God and the things that matter.
You said that it was not flippancy. Your whole point of view is wrong. Do not ask me how I "know"--some conclusions do not need to be analyzed. I wonder if you realize, for instance, what you said about faith? I haven't the charity to call it even childish. Have you ever got below the surface of anything at all? Do you want to know what it is that has brought you to the verge of suicide? It is not your horror of illness, nor your oddly concluded determination to marry a man whom you do not love. Suicide is an ugly word--I notice that you avoid it--and love is a big word; I am using them understandingly and soberly. You came to the edge of this thing for the reason that there is not an element of bigness in your life, and there never has been. You lack the balance of large ideas. This man of whom you tell me--of course you do not love him--you have not yet the capacity for understanding the meaning of the word. You like to ride and you like to dance and you are fond of the things that please, but you do not love anybody or even any thing. You are living, yes, but you are asleep. And it is because you are ignorant.
If your letter had been designedly flippant, it would merely have annoyed. It is the unconscious flippancy in it that is so discouraging. You do not know what you believe because you believe nothing. Your most coherent conception of God is likely a hazy vision of a majestic figure seated on a cloud--a long-bearded patriarch, wearing a golden crown--the composite of famous pictures that you have seen. You have been taught to believe in a personal God, and you have never taken the trouble to get beyond the notion that personality--God's or anybody's--is mainly a matter of the possession of such things as hands and feet. What can be the meaning to one like you of the truth that we are made in the image of God? The Kingdom of Heaven--that whole whirling activity of the commonwealth of God--the citizenship towards which you might be pointing Baxter Court--you have not even imagined it. I am not being sentimental. Don't misunderstand. Don't fancy, for instance, that I am exhorting you to go slumming. Deliberately or not, you took a wrong impression from my first letter. You can't mistake this. Reach after a few of the realities. Why not shut your questioning mind a while and open your soul? Live a little--begin to realize that there