LI

Galgenberg, Oct. 22d.

Dear Mr. Anstruther,--This is a world, it seems to me, where everybody

spends their time falling out of love and making their relations

uncomfortable. I have only two friends, the rest of my friends being

acquaintances, and both have done it or had it done to them. Is it then

to be wondered at that I should argue that if it happens to both my

friends in a set where there are only two, the entire world must be

divided into those who give up and those who are given up, with a Greek

chorus of lamenting and explanatory relatives as a finish? Really one

might think that love, and its caprices, and its tantrums--you see I'm

in my shrewish mood--makes up the whole of life. Here's Vicki groaning

in the throes of a relapse because some one has written that she met her

late lover at a party and that he ate only soup,--here she is overcome

by this picture which she translates as a hankering in spite of

everything after her, and wanting to write to him, and ready to console

him and crying her eyes all red again, and no longer taking the remotest

interest in _Comus_ or in those frequent addresses of mine to her on

Homely Subjects to which up to yesterday she listened with such

flattering respect; and here are you writing me the most melancholy

letters, longer and drearier than any letters ever were before, filled

with yearnings after something that certainly is not Miss Cheriton--but

beyond that certainty I can make out nothing. It is a strange and

wonderful world. I stand bewildered, with you on one side and Vicki on

the other, and fling exhortations at you in turn. I try scolding, to

brace you, but neither of you will be braced. I try sympathy, to soothe

you, but neither of you will be soothed. What am I to do? May I laugh?

Will that give too deep offence? I'm afraid I did laugh over your

father's cable from America when the news of your broken engagement

reached him. You ask me what I think of a father who just cables 'Fool'

to his son at a moment when his son is being horribly worried. Well, you

must consider that cabling is expensive, and he didn't care to put more

than one word, and if there had been two it might have made you still

angrier. But seriously, I do see that it must have annoyed you, and I

soon left off being so unkind as to laugh. It is odd how much older I

feel than either of you lamenters; quite old, and quite settled, and so

objective somehow. I hope being objective doesn't make one

unsympathetic, but I expect it really rather tends that way; and yet if

it were so, and I were as hard and husky as I sometimes dimly fear I may

be growing, would you and Vicki want to tell me your sorrows? And other

people do too. Think of it, Papa Lindeberg, hitherto a long narrow

person buttoned up silently in black, mysterious simply because he held

his tongue, a reader of rabid Conservative papers through black-rimmed

glasses, and as numb in the fingers as Wordsworth when he shakes my

respectful hand, has begun to unbend, to unfold, to expand like those

Japanese dried flowers you fling into water; and having started with

good mornings and weather comments and politics, and from them proceeded

to the satisfactorily confused state of the British army, has gone on

imperceptibly but surely to confidential criticisms of the mistakes made

here at headquarters in invariably shelving the best officers at the

very moment when they have arrived at what he describes as their prime,

and has now reached the stage when he comes up through the orchard every

morning at the hour I am due for my lesson to help me over the fence. He

comes up with much stateliness and deliberation, but he does come up;

and we walk down together, and every day the volume of his confidences

increases and he more and more minutely describes his grievances. I

listen and nod my head, which is easy and apparently all he wants. His

wife stops him at once, if he begins to her, by telling him with as much

roundness as is consistent with being born a Dammerlitz that the

calamities that have overtaken them are entirely his fault. Why was he

not as clever as those subordinates who were put over his head? she asks

with dangerous tranquillity; and nobody can answer a question like that.

'It makes me twenty years younger,' he said yesterday as he handed me

over the fence with the same politeness I have seen in the manner of old

men handing large dowagers to their places in a set of quadrilles, 'to

see your cheerful morning face.'

'If you had said shining morning face you'd have been quoting

Shakespeare,' said I.

'Ah yes. I fear my Shakespeare days are done. I am now at the time of

life when serious and practical considerations take up the entire

attention of a man. Shakespeare is more suitable now for my daughter

than for me.'

'But clever men do read him.'

'Ah yes.'

'Quite grown-up ones do.'

'Ah yes.'

'With beards.'

'Ah yes.'

'Real men.'

'Ah yes, yes. Professors. Theatre people. People of no family. People

who have no serious responsibilities on their shoulders. People of the

pen, not men of the sword. But officers--and who in our country of the

well-born is not, was not, or will not be an officer?--have no time for

general literature. Of course,' he added with a slight bow, for he

regards me as personally responsible for everybody and everything

English--'we have all heard of him.'

'Indeed?' said I.

'When I was a boy,' he said this morning, 'I read at school of a young

woman--a mythological person--called Hebe.'

'She was the daughter of Juno and wild lettuce,' said I.

'It may be,' he said. 'The parentages of the mythological period are

curiously intricate. But why is it, dear Fräulein Schmidt, that though I

can recollect nothing of her but her name, whenever I see you you remind

me of her?'

Now was not that very pleasant? Hebe, the restorer of youth to gods and

men; Hebe, the vigorous and wholesome. Thoreau says she was probably the

only thoroughly sound-conditioned and robust young lady that ever walked

the globe, and that whenever she came it was spring. No wonder I was

pleased.

'Perhaps it's because I'm healthy,' said I.

'Is that it?' he said, obviously fumbling about in his brain for the

reason. And when he got to the house he displayed the results of his

fumbling by saying, 'But many people are healthy.'

'Yes,' said I; and left him to think it out alone.

So now there are two nice young women I've been compared to--you once

said I was like Nausicaa, and here a year later, a year in which various

rather salt and stinging waves have gone over my head, is somebody

comparing me to Hebe. Evidently the waves did me no harm. It is true on

the other hand that Papa Lindeberg is short-sighted. It is also true

that last night I found a beautiful shining silvery hair insolently

flaunting in the very front of my head. 'Yes, yes, my dear,' said

Papa--my Papa--when I showed it him, 'we are growing old.'

'And settled. And objective,' said I, carefully pulling it out before

the glass. 'And yet, Papachen, inside me I feel quite young.'

Papa chuckled. 'Insides are no safe criterion, my dear,' he said. 'It is

the outside that tells.'

'Tells what?'

'A woman's age.'

Evidently I have not yet reminded my own Papa of Hebe.