Literary Love-Letters | Page 7

game.
You see I am looking for number nine and my four horses. Then I mean
to invite you to my country house, to have a lot of "fat" girls to meet
you who will talk slang at you, and one of them shall marry you--one
whose father is a great newspaper man. And your new papa will start
you in the business of making public opinion. You will play with that,
too, but, then, you will be coining money.
No, not here in Chicago, but if you had talked to me at Sorrento as you
write me from your sanctum on the roof, I might have listened and
dreamed. The sea makes me believe and hope. I love it so! That's why I
made mamma take a house near the lake--to be near a little piece of
infinity. Yes, if you had paddled me out of the harbor at Sorrento, some
fine night when the swell was rippling in, like the groaning of a sleepy
beast, and the hills were a-hush on the shore, then we might have gone
on to that place you are so fond of, "the land east of the sun, and west
of the moon."

NO. VIII. BIOGRAPHIC AND JUDICIAL.
(Eastlake replies analytically.)
But don't marry him until we are clear on all matters. I haven't finished
your case. And don't marry that foreign-looking cavalier you were
riding with to-day in the park. You are too American ever to be at home
over there. You would smash their fragile china, and you wouldn't
understand. England might fit you, though, for England is something
like that dark green, prairie park, with its regular, bushy trees against a
Gainsborough sky. You live deeply in the fierce open air. The English
like that. However, America must not lose you.
You it was, I am sure, who moved your family in that conventional
pilgrimage of ambitious Chicagoans--west, south, north. Neither your
father nor your mother would have stirred from sober little Grant Street
had you not felt the pressing necessity for a career. Rumor got hold of
you first on the South Side, and had it that you were experimenting
with some small contractor. The explosion which followed reached me
even in Vienna. Did you feel that you could go farther, or did you
courageously run the risk of wrecking him then instead of wrecking
yourself and him later? Oh well, he's comfortably married now, and all
the pain you gave him was probably educative. You may look at his
flaunting granite house on that broad boulevard, and think well of your
courage.
Your father died. You moved northward to that modest house tucked in
lovingly under the ample shelter of the millionnaires on the Lake Shore
Drive. I fancy there has always been the gambler in your nerves; that
you have sacrificed your principle to getting a rapid return on your
money. And you have dominated your family: you sent your two
brothers to Harvard, and filled them with ambitions akin to yours. Now
you are impatient because the thin ice cracks a bit.
But I have great faith: you will mend matters by some shrewd deal with
the manipulators at Hoffmeyer's, or by marrying number nine. You will

do it honestly--I mean the marrying; for you will convince him that you
love, so far as love is in you, and you will convince yourself that
marriage, the end of it all, is unselfish, though prosaic. You will accept
resignation with an occasional sigh, feeling that you have gone far,
perhaps as far as you can go. I trust that solution will not come quickly,
however, because I cannot regard it as a brilliant ending to your
evolution. For you have kept yourself sweet and clean from fads, and
mean pushing, and the vulgar machinery of society. You never forced
your way or intrigued. You have talked and smiled and bewitched
yourself straight to the point where you now are. You were eager and
curious about pleasures, and the world has dealt liberally with you.
Were you perilously near the crisis when you wrote me? Did the
reflective tone come because you were brought at last squarely to the
mark, because you must decide what one of the possible conceptions of
life you really want? Don't think, I pray you; go straight on to the
inevitable solution, for when you become conscious you are lost.
Do you wonder that I love you, my hybrid rose; that I follow the heavy
petals as they push themselves out into their final bloom; that I gather
the aroma to comfort my heart in these lifeless pages? I follow you
about in your devious path from tea to dinner or dance, or I wait at the
opera or theatre to watch for a new