I
May 1, 1900.
Dearest Judy: Neal says that when you say for me not to write anything
about people unless I can write good things about them you are
displaying the worst sort of Quilter sentimentality. Uncle Phineas
says that your dictum would deplete the libraries. He says to tell you
that, if you don’t know your Plato, you should know your Boswell and
your Pepys. But Grandfather says that the whole secret of the art of
letter writing lies in writing not what one wishes to chronicle, but
what the recipient can find delight in reading. So, I shall try to
write only good things about everyone in your letters. Just now that
may be difficult. It can’t be helped. And, if you should change your
mind, after having Neal’s and Uncle Phineas’s opinions, please let me
know.
You ask what has happened to my lessons. It was necessary to
discontinue them for a while, after Chris and Irene came home. Aunt
Gracia was too busy to hear them. But now I am having them every day
with Chris. And, of course, my Latin twice a week with Grandfather,
and my music and French with Olympe.
Chris has time now for my lessons. He has stopped helping Father and
Neal with the ranch work and has begun his writing again. He was no
real help, anyway, to Father and Neal. And, when he writes, there is
always a possibility that he may make a great deal of money and also
achieve fame. He has begun a new play and has the cast of characters
all made out. The leading man’s rôle is to be for Nat Goodwin.
Irene is happier now that Christopher stays in the house all the time
with her. We have tried to get her to ride with us, but she is afraid
even of Wednesday’s Child. She says she would not be afraid to ride in
a ladies’ phaëton, if we had one. She has sent to New York for some of
her household things that she left there. When they come she is going
to fix up her room and Chris’s so that it can be called a studio.
Yesterday was Olympe’s sixty-first birthday. We had dinner in the
evening and a celebration. Olympe sat in Grandfather’s chair at the
head of the table, and remembered her chin, and was superb. Especially
superb when everyone stood and drank her toast with the table claret
we had left over from your wedding. Dong Lee baked a triumph of a
cake, and we put one tall wax taper in its centre. (White wax tapers
always remind me of Aunt Gracia.) I wish we might celebrate for Olympe
several times each year. She is so transcendent when she is happy.
Even Irene said, last night, that Olympe was not unlike Sarah
Bernhardt. We missed you and Greg so much that not one of us mentioned
either of you all evening.
I fear that what you suggest about my sense of humour may be just. It
has often troubled me. But Grandfather says humour is a faculty which
develops late. He says one should not blame me for not having a fully
developed sense of humour, unless one is willing to blame me for not
having a fully developed stature. He says that my sense of humour is
coming on nicely; that I have a sense of wit and a sense of the
ludicrous, and that the more subtle sense will develop as I develop. I
hope it is true. But I know that Grandfather is inclined to overrate
my abilities. Irene says he greatly overrates them. She has a little
girl friend, only fourteen years old, who is a reporter on one of the
big New York daily papers. Grandfather said that he presumed the child
was an orphan. Irene said no indeed she was not. Are orphans supposed
to be brighter than other children?
Dear sister, I send very much love to you and Greg.—Lucy.
II
May 30, 1900.
Dearest Judy dear: I am glad that you have given me some leeway about
writing. Until your letter came, it seemed impossible for me to write
at all.
It is Uncle Phineas’s fault. He wishes to join the new gold rush to
Nome, Alaska, and he is trying to get Chris to go with him. Uncle
Phineas, while he doesn’t seem old, is edging close to seventy. Chris
has had no training for hardships, and would not know a gold mine from
a gopher hole. We could not raise money anywhere for them to go
properly equipped. If we could, according to the warnings in the
newspapers, the expedition would be, as Grandfather says, criminal
folly. (Of course, all I have been writing about this is gleanings
from the elders.) The _Oregonian_, a few days ago, had an account of
the dreadful dangers and hardships that gold seekers are having to
endure. But, in spite of everything, Uncle Phineas and Chris forge
right ahead with their plans. It makes one think that Aunt Gracia is
right about the childishness of men—though Grandfather and darling
Father would have to be the exceptions that prove that rule.
Olympe is wearing her dreariest gowns and is more tragic than I have
ever seen her. She has added ever so many clauses to her Quilter men
speech (none of them pleasant), and has revised the Quilter wives’
speech until it is almost heartbreaking. But Irene has reformed. She
offers quite often to dust the rooms. She reads Elbert Hubbard, and
Neal says that she is conspicuously living, loving, laughing, and
doing things worth while. That seems well enough to me. Neal says that
it is wormy. Everything is wormy for Neal, lately. It is an unpleasant
new word of his. Marriage, he says, is wormy. He has resolved never to
marry. Even love, he says, is wormy. He says it does to men what
barnacles do to ships. He says to look at what a fine, free-sailing
craft Chris was, before Irene barnacled him all over with her messy
love. Neal is growing cynical and pessimistic. Grandfather says it
doesn’t matter; it is an unavoidable phase of male adolescence.
Some of Irene’s household things have come. She has not unpacked them
yet, as she doesn’t care to have the room called a studio if Chris
goes to Nome. Possibly, then, she would like a _boudoir_. (She has
been asking me how to spell French and Latin words for her, when she
writes to her friends. I have told her for weeks. But, after thinking
it over, I decided, one day, it would be kinder to tell her what
Grandfather said about using foreign words in one’s letters. She
cried, and told Chris that I had said she was vulgar. I had not. I
apologized, though, to please her. I didn’t mind at all.) She has
unpacked some of her linen, to put it in the blue closet so it won’t
turn yellow. It is not as handsome as our best linen, but better than
our third best and much more fancy. She has big initials embroidered
on it. The initial is “B.” I asked her why, since I had thought her
name had been Irene Guildersen.
She was much astonished to discover that the others had not told me
Christopher was her second husband. She seemed proud of it. She told
me very admirable things about her first husband, who is still living.
She divorced him.
Later, when discussing the matter with members of the family, I found
that all of them, except Aunt Gracia, approve of divorce and think
there is nothing even odd about it if, they said, it was procured
because of genuine provocation. These opinions of theirs make it hard
for me to understand why none of them had told me about Irene’s
divorce. Sometimes, though rarely, I agree with Neal, who is
declaring, of late, that there is no accounting for Quilters.
I love you dearly. I love Greg dearly, too.—Lucy.