Majorie Daw | Page 4

is beyond my skill, but maybe it
is not beyond yours. You are Flemming's intimate friend, his fidus
Achates. Write to him, write to him frequently, distract his mind, cheer
him up, and prevent him from becoming a confirmed case of
melancholia. Perhaps he has some important plans disarranged by his
present confinement. If he has you will know, and will know how to
advise him judiciously. I trust your father finds the change beneficial? I
am, my dear sir, with great respect, etc.
II.
EDWARD DELANEY TO JOHN FLEMMING, WEST 38TH
STREET, NEW YORK.
August 9, 1872.
My Dear Jack: I had a line from Dillon this morning, and was rejoiced
to learn that your hurt is not so bad as reported. Like a certain
personage, you are not so black and blue as you are painted. Dillon will
put you on your pins again in two to three weeks, if you will only have
patience and follow his counsels. Did you get my note of last
Wednesday? I was greatly troubled when I heard of the accident.
I can imagine how tranquil and saintly you are with your leg in a trough!
It is deuced awkward, to be sure, just as we had promised ourselves a
glorious month together at the sea-side; but we must make the best of it.
It is unfortunate, too, that my father's health renders it impossible for
me to leave him. I think he has much improved; the sea air is his native
element; but he still needs my arm to lean upon in his walks, and
requires some one more careful that a servant to look after him. I
cannot come to you, dear Jack, but I have hours of unemployed time on
hand, and I will write you a whole post-office full of letters, if that will
divert you. Heaven knows, I haven't anything to write about. It isn't as

if we were living at one of the beach houses; then I could do you some
character studies, and fill your imagination with groups of
sea-goddesses, with their (or somebody else's) raven and blonde manes
hanging down their shoulders. You should have Aphrodite in morning
wrapper, in evening costume, and in her prettiest bathing suit. But we
are far from all that here. We have rooms in a farm-house, on a
cross-road, two miles from the hotels, and lead the quietest of lives.
I wish I were a novelist. This old house, with its sanded floors and high
wainscots, and its narrow windows looking out upon a cluster of pines
that turn themselves into aeolian harps every time the wind blows,
would be the place in which to write a summer romance. It should be a
story with the odors of the forest and the breath of the sea in it. It
should be a novel like one of that Russian fellow's--what's his
name?--Tourguenieff, Turguenef, Turgenif, Toorguniff,
Turgenjew--nobody knows how to spell him. Yet I wonder if even a
Liza or an Alexandra Paulovna could stir the heart of a man who has
constant twinges in his leg. I wonder if one of our own Yankee girls of
the best type, haughty and spirituelle, would be of any comfort to you
in your present deplorable condition. If I thought so, I would hasten
down to the Surf House and catch one for you; or, better still, I would
find you one over the way.
Picture to yourself a large white house just across the road, nearly
opposite our cottage. It is not a house, but a mansion, built, perhaps, in
the colonial period, with rambling extensions, and gambrel roof, and a
wide piazza on three sides--a self- possessed, high-bred piece of
architecture, with its nose in the air. It stands back from the road, and
has an obsequious retinue of fringed elms and oaks and weeping
willows. Sometimes in the morning, and oftener in the afternoon, when
the sun has withdrawn from that part of the mansions, a young woman
appears on the piazza with some mysterious Penelope web of
embroidery in her hand, or a book. There is a hammock over there--of
pineapple fibre, it looks from here. A hammock is very becoming when
one is eighteen, and has golden hair, and dark eyes, and an
emerald-colored illusion dress looped up after the fashion of a Dresden
china shepherdess, and is chaussee like a belle of the time of Louis
Quatorze. All this splendor goes into that hammock, and sways there
like a pond-lily in the golden afternoon. The window of my bedroom

looks down on that piazza--and so do I.
But enough of the nonsense, which ill becomes a sedate young attorney
taking his vacation with an invalid father. Drop me a line, dear Jack,
and tell me how you really