Literary Love-Letters | Page 5

the world dance for
you in this joyous fashion. Some are hard to satisfy--for example, you,
my lady--and you go your restless, brilliant little way, flirting with this
man, coquetting with that, examining a third, until your heart grows
weary or until you are at peace. You may marry for money or for love,
and in twenty years you will teach your daughters that love doesn't pay
at less than ten thousand a year. But you don't expect them to believe
you, and they don't.
I am not sneering at you. I would not have it otherwise, for the world
would be one half cheaper if women like you did not follow the
perpetual instinct. True, civilization tends to curb this romantic desire,
but when civilization runs against a passionate nature we have a
tragedy. The world is sweeter, deeper, for that. Live and love, if you
can, and give the lie to facts. Be restless, be insatiable, be wicked, but
believe that your body and soul were meant for more than food and
raiment; that somewhere, somehow, some day, you will meet the dream
made real, and that he will unlock the secrets of this life.
It is late. I am tired. The noises of the city begin, far down in the
darkness. This carries love.

NO. V. AROUSED.
(Miss Armstrong protests and invites.)
It is real, real, real. If I can say so, after going on all these years with
but one idea (according to my good friends) of settling myself
comfortably in some large home, shouldn't you believe it? You have
lived more interestingly than I, and you are not dependent, as most of
us are. You really mock me through it all. You think I am worthy of
only a kind of candy that you carry about for agreeable children, which
you call love. To me, sir, it reads like an insult--your message of love
tucked in concisely at the close.
No, keep to facts, for they are your metier. You make them interesting.
Tell me more about your idle, contemplative self. And let me see you
to-morrow at the Thorntons'. Leave your sombre eyes at home, and
don't expect infinities in tea-gabble. I saw you at the opera last night.
For some moments, while Melba was singing, I wanted you and your
confectioner's love. That Melba might always sing, and the tide always
flood the marshes! On the whole, I like candy. Send me a page of it.
E. A.

NO. VI. AUTOBIOGRAPHIC.
(Eastlake, disregarding her comments, continues.)
Dear lady, did you ever read some stately bit of prose, which caught in
its glamour of splendid words the vital, throbbing world of affairs and
passions, some crystallization of a rich experience, and then by chance
turn to the "newsy" column of an American newspaper? (Forsooth,
these must be literary letters!) Well, that tells the sensations of going
from Europe to Wabash. I had caught the sound of the greater harmony,
or struggle, and I must accept the squeak of the melodeon. I did not
think highly of myself; had started too far back in the race, and I knew
that laborious years of intense zeal would place me only third class, or
even lower, in any pursuit of the arts. Perhaps if I had felt that I could

have made a good third class, I should have fought it out in Europe.
There are some things man cannot accomplish, however, our optimistic
national creed to the contrary. And there would have been something
low in disappointing my father for such ignoble results, such imperfect
satisfaction.
So to Wabash I went. I resolved to adapt myself to the billiards and
whiskey of the Commercial Club, and to the desk in the inner office
behind the glass partitions. And I like to think that I satisfied my father
those two years in the mills. After a time I achieved a lazy content. At
first I tried to deceive myself; to think that the newsy column of
Wabash was as significant as the grand page of London or Paris. That
simple yarn didn't satisfy me many months.
Then my father died. I hung on at the mills for a time, until the strikes
and the general depression gave me valid reasons for withdrawing. To
skip details, I sold out my interests, and with my little capital came to
Chicago. My income, still dependent in some part upon those Wabash
mills, trembles back and forth in unstable equilibrium.
Chicago was too much like Wabash just then. I went to Florence to join
a man, half German Jew, half American, wholly cosmopolite, whom I
had known in Paris. His life was very thin: it consisted wholly of
interests--a tenuous sort of existence. I can thank him for two things:
that I