Literary Love-Letters | Page 8

light in your face, to see your world
written in a smile. You are dark, and winning, and strong. You are
pagan in your love of sensuous, full things. You are grateful to the
biting air as it touches your cheek and sends the blood leaping in glad
life. You love water and fire and wind, elemental things, and you love
them with fervor and passion. All this to the world! Much more
intimate to me, who can read the letters you scrawl for the impudent,
careless world. For deep down in the core of that rose there lies a soul
that permeates it all--a longing, restless soul, one moment revealing a
heaven that the next is shut out in dark despair.
Yes, keep the cottage by the sea for one more dream. Perchance I shall
find something stable, eternal, something better than discontent and
striving; for the sea is great and makes peace.

NO. IX. CRITICISM.
(Miss Armstrong vindicates herself by scorning.)
You are a tissue of phrases. You feel only words. You love! What
mockery to hear you handle the worn, old words! You have secluded
yourself in careful isolation from the human world you seem to despise.
You have no right to its passions and solaces. Incarnate selfishness,
dear friend, I suspect you are. You would not permit the disturbance of
a ripple in the contemplative lake of your life such as love and marriage
might bring.
Pray what right may you have to stew me in a saucepan up on your roof,
and to send me flavors of myself done up nicely into little packages
labelled deceitfully "love"? It is lucky that this time you have come
across a woman who has played the game before, and can meet you
point by point. But I am too weary to argue with a man who carries
two-edged words, flattery on one side and sneers on the reverse. Mark
this one thing, nevertheless: if I should decide to sell myself
advantageously next season I should be infinitely better than you,--for I
am only a woman.
E. A.

NO. X. THE LIMITATION OF LIFE.
(Eastlake summarizes, and intends to conclude.)
My lady, my humor of to-day makes me take up the charges in your
last letters; I will define, not defend, myself. You fall out with me
because I am a dilettante (or many words to that one effect), and you
abuse me because I deal in the form rather than the matter of love. Is
that not just to you?
In short, I am not as your other admirers, and the variation in the
species has lost the charm of novelty.

Believe me that I am honest to-day, at least; indeed, I think you will
understand. Only the college boy who feeds on Oscar Wilde and
sentimental pessimism has that disease of indifference with which you
crudely charge me. It is a kind of chicken-pox, cousin-French to the
evils of literary Paris. But I must not thank God too loudly, or you will
think I am one with them at heart.
No, I am in earnest, in terrible earnest, about all this--I mean life and
what to do with it. That is a great day when a man comes into his own,
no matter how paltry the pittance may be the gods have given
him--when he comes to know just how far he can go, and where lies his
path of least resistance. That I know. I am tremendously sure of myself
now, and, like your good business men, I go about my affairs and
dispose of my life with its few energies in a cautious, economical way.
What is all this I make so much to-do about? Very little, I confess, but
to me more serious than L's and sky-scrapers; yes, than love. Mine is an
infinite labor: first to shape the true tool, and then to master the
material! I grant you I may die any day like a rat on a housetop, with
only a bundle of musty papers, the tags of broken conversations, and
one or two dead, distorted nerves. That is our common risk. But I shall
accomplish as much of the road as God permits the snail, and I shall
have moulded something; life will have justified itself to me, or I to life.
But that is not our problem to-day.
Why do I isolate myself? Because a few pursuits in life are great
taskmasters and jealous ones. A wise man who had felt that truth wrote
about it once. I must husband my devotions: love, except the idea of
love, is not for me; pleasure, except the idea of pleasure, is too keen for
me; energy, except the ideas energy creates, is beyond me. I am limited,
definite, alone, without you.
I