Jena, Nov. 12th.
Dearest of Living Creatures, the joy your dear, dear letters gave me!
You should have seen me seize the postman. His very fingers seemed
rosy-tipped as he gave me the precious things. Two of them--two
love-letters all at once. I could hardly bear to open them, and put an
end to the wonderful moment. The first one, from Frankfurt, was so
sweet--oh, so unutterably sweet--that I did sit gloating over the
unbroken envelope of the other for at least five minutes, luxuriating,
purring. I found out exactly where your hand must have been, by the
simple process of getting a pen and pretending to write the address
where you had written it, and then spent another five minutes most
profitably kissing the place. Perhaps I ought not to tell you this, but
there shall be no so-called maidenly simperings between you and me, no
pretences, no affectations. If it was silly to kiss that blessed
envelope, and silly to tell you that I did, why then I was silly, and
there's an end of it.
Do you know that my mother's maiden name was Watson? Well, it was. I
feel bound to tell you this, for it seems to add to my ineligibleness,
and my duty plainly is to take you all round that and expatiate on it
from every point of view. What has the grandson of Lord Grasmere--you
never told me of Lord G. before, by the way--to do with the
granddaughter of Watson? I don't even rightly know what Watson was. He
was always for me an obscure and rather awful figure, shrouded in
mystery. Of course Papa could tell me about him, but as he never has,
and my mother rarely mentioned him, I fancy he was not anything I should
be proud of. Do not, then, require of me that I shall tear the veil from
Watson.
And of course your mother was handsome. How dare you doubt it? Look in
the glass and be grateful to her. You know, though you may only have
come within the spell of what you so sweetly call my darling brown eyes
during the last few weeks, I fell a victim to your darling blue ones in
the first five minutes. And how great was my joy when I discovered that
your soul so exactly matched your outside. Your mother had blue eyes,
too, and was very tall, and had an extraordinarily thoughtful face.
Look, I tell you, in the glass, and you'll see she had; for I refuse to
believe that your father, a man who talks port wine and tomatoes the
whole of the first meal he has with his only son after a year's
separation, is the parent you are like. Heavens, how I shake when I
think of what will happen when you tell him about me. 'Sir,' he'll say,
in a voice of thunder--or don't angry English parents call their sons
'sir' any more? Anyhow, they still do in books--'Sir, you are far too
young to marry. Young men of twenty-five do not do such things. The
lady, I conclude, will provide the income?
Roger, rushing to the point: She hasn't a pfenning.
Incensed Parent: Pfenning, sir? What, am I to understand she's a German?
Roger, dreadfully frightened: Please.
I.P., forcing himself to be calm: Who is this young person?
Roger: Fräulein Schmidt, of Jena.
I.P., now of a horrible calmness: And who, pray, is Fräulein Schmidt, of
Jena?
Roger, pale but brave: The daughter of old Schmidt, in whose house I
boarded. Her mother was English. She was a Watson.