FullReads

I shall probably be thinking about the rents in your block, and wondering if the family had best put up a sky-scraper, instead of doing all the pretty little things you mention in your letter. At five-and-twenty one becomes practical, if one is a woman whose father has left barely enough to go around among two women who like luxury, and two greedy boys at college with expensive “careers” ahead. This letter finds me in the trough of the wave. I wonder if it’s what you call “the ennui of many dinners?” More likely it’s because we can’t keep our cottage at Sorrento. Well-a- day! it’s gray this morning, and I will write off a fit of the blues.

I think it’s about time to marry number nine. It would relieve the family immensely. I suspect they think I have had my share of fun. Probably you will take this as an exquisite joke, but ’tis the truth, alas!

Last night I was at the Hoffmeyers’ at dinner. It was slow. All such dinners are slow. The good Fraus don’t know how to mix the sheep and the goats. For a passing moment they talked about you and about your book in a puzzled way. They think you so clever and so odd. But I know how hollow he is, and how thin his fame! I got some points on the new L from the Hoffmeyers and young Mr. Knowlton. That was interesting and exciting. We dealt in millions as if they were checkers. These practical men have a better grip on life than the cynics and dreamers like you. You call them plebeian and bourgeois and Philistine and limited–all the bad names in your select vocabulary. But they know how to feel in the good, old, common-sense way. You’ve lost that. I like plebeian earnestness and push. I like success at something, and hearty enjoyment, and good dinners, and big men who talk about a million as if it were a ten-spot in the 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.