Literary Love-Letters | Page 2

an ice
and waited--but you will have to supply the details.
Meantime, you sailed on, with that same everlasting enthusiasm upon
your face that I knew six years ago, until you spied me. How extremely
natural you made your greeting! I confess I believed that I had lived for
that smile six years, and suffered a bad noise for the sound of your
voice. It seemed but a minute until we found ourselves almost alone
with the solid women at the ices. One swift phrase from you, and we
had slipped back through the meaningless years till we stood there in
the parlor at Grant Street, mere boy and girl. The babbling room
vanished for a few golden moments. Then you rustled off, and I believe
I told Mrs. Goodrich that musicales were very nice, for they gave you a
chance to talk. And I went to the dressing-room, wondering what rare
chance had brought me again within the bondage of that voice.
Then, then, dear pinks, you came sailing over the stairs, peeping out
from that bunch of lace. I loitered and spoke. Were the eyes green, or
blue, or gray; ambition, or love, or indifference to the world? I was at
my old puzzle again, while you unfastened the pinks, and, before the
butler, who acquiesced at your frivolity in impertinent silence, you held
them out to me. Only you know the preciousness of unsought-for
favors. "Write me," you said; and I write.
What should man write about to you but of love and yourself? My pen,
I see, has not lost its personal gait in running over the mill books.

Perhaps it politely anticipates what is expected! So much the better, say,
for you expect what all men give--love and devotion. You would not
know a man who could not love you. Your little world is a circle of
possibilities. Let me explain. Each lover is a possible conception of life
placed at a slightly different angle from his predecessor or successor.
Within this circle you have turned and turned, until your head is a bit
weary. But I stand outside and observe the whirligig. Shall I be drawn
in? No, for I should become only a conventional interest. "If the salt,"
etc. I remember you once taught in a mission school.
The flowers will tell me no more! Next time give me a rose--a huge,
hybrid, opulent rose, the product of a dozen forcing processes--and I
will love you a new way. As the flowers say good-by, I will say
goodnight. Shall I burn them? No, for they would smoulder. And if I
left them here alone, to-morrow they would be wan. There! I have
thrown them out wide into that gulf of a street twelve stories below.
They will flutter down in the smoky darkness, and fall, like a message
from the land of the lotus-eaters, upon a prosy wayfarer. And safe in
my heart there lives that gracious picture of my lady as she stands
above me and gives them to me. That is eternal: you and the pinks are
but phantoms. Farewell!

NO. II. ACQUIESCENT AND ENCOURAGING.
(Miss Armstrong replies on a dull blue, canvas-textured page, over
which her stub-pen wanders in fashionable negligence. She arrives on
the third page at the matter in hand.)
Ah, it was very sweet, your literary love-letter. Considerable style, as
you would say, but too palpably artificial. If you want to deceive this
woman, my dear sir trifler, you must disguise your mockery more
artfully.
Why didn't I find you at the Stanwoods'? I had Nettie send you a card. I
had promised you to a dozen delightful women, "our choicest lot," who
were all agog to see my supercilious and dainty sir.... Why will you

always play with things? Perhaps you will say because I am not worth
serious moments. You play with everything, I believe, and that is banal.
Ever sincerely,
EDITH ARMSTRONG.

NO. III. EXPLANATORY AND AUTOBIOGRAPHIC.
(Eastlake has the masculine fondness for seeing himself in the right.)
I turned the Stanwoods' card down, and for your sake, or rather for the
sake of your memory. I preferred to sit here and dream about you in the
midst of my chimney-pots and the dull March mists rather than to run
the risk of another, and perhaps fatal, impression. And so far as you are
concerned your reproach is just. Do I "play with everything"? Perhaps I
am afraid that it might play with me. Imagine frolicking with tigers,
who might take you seriously some day, as a tidbit for afternoon tea--if
you should confess that you were serious! That's the way I think of the
world, or, rather, your part of it. Surely, it is a magnificent game,
whose rules we learn completely just