Jena, Nov. 18th.
Dearest,--I don't think I like that girl at all. Your letter from
Clinches has just come, and I don't think I like her at all. What is
more, I don't think I ever shall like her. And what is still more, I
don't think I even want to. So your idea of her being a good friend to
me later on in London must retire to that draughty corner of space where
abortive ideas are left to eternal shivering. I'm sorry if I am
offensively independent. But then I know so well that I won't be lonely
if I'm with you, and I think rooting up, which you speak of as a
difficult and probably painful process, must be very nice if you are the
one to do it, and I am sure I could never by any possibility reach such
depths of strangeness and doubt about what to do next as would induce me
to stretch out appealing hands to a young woman with eyes that, as you
put it, tilt at the corners. I wish you hadn't told her about us, about
me. It has profaned things so, dragged them out into the streets,
cheapened them. I don't in the least want to tell my father, or any one
else. Does this sound as though I were angry? Well, I don't think I am.
On the contrary, I rather want to laugh. You dear silly! So clever and
so simple, so wise and crammed with learning, and such a dear, ineffable
goose. How old am I, I wonder? Only as old as you? Really only as old?
Nonsense: I'm fifteen, twenty years your senior, my dear sir. I've lived
in Jena, you in London I frequent _Kaffee-Klatsches_, and you the great
world. I talk much with Johanna in the kitchen, and you with heaven
knows what in the way of geniuses. Yet no male Nancy Cheriton, were his
eyelids never so tilted, would wring a word out of me about a thing so
near, so precious, so much soul of my soul as my lover.
How would you explain this? I've tried and can't.