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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 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.