(_Miss Armstrong is nearing the close of her fifth season. Prospect and
retrospect are equally uninviting. She wills to escape_.)
I shall probably be thinking about the rents in your block, and
wondering if the family had best put up a sky-scraper, instead of doing
all the pretty little things you mention in your letter. At
five-and-twenty one becomes practical, if one is a woman whose father
has left barely enough to go around among two women who like luxury,
and two greedy boys at college with expensive "careers" ahead. This
letter finds me in the trough of the wave. I wonder if it's what you
call "the ennui of many dinners?" More likely it's because we can't
keep our cottage at Sorrento. Well-a-day! it's gray this morning, and I
will write off a fit of the blues.
I think it's about time to marry number nine. It would relieve the
family immensely. I suspect they think I have had my share of fun.
Probably you will take this as an exquisite joke, but 'tis the truth,
alas!
Last night I was at the Hoffmeyers' at dinner. It was slow. All such
dinners are slow. The good Fraus don't know how to mix the sheep and
the goats. For a passing moment they talked about you and about your
book in a puzzled way. They think you so clever and so odd. But I know
how hollow he is, and how thin his fame! I got some points on the new L
from the Hoffmeyers and young Mr. Knowlton. That was interesting and
exciting. We dealt in millions as if they were checkers. These
practical men have a better grip on life than the cynics and dreamers
like you. You call them plebeian and _bourgeois_ and Philistine and
limited--all the bad names in your select vocabulary. But they know how
to feel in the good, old, common-sense way. You've lost that. I like
plebeian earnestness and push. I like success at something, and hearty
enjoyment, and good dinners, and big men who talk about a million as if
it were a ten-spot in the game.
You see I am looking for number nine and my four horses. Then I mean to
invite you to my country house, to have a lot of "fat" girls to meet
you who will talk slang at you, and one of them shall marry you--one
whose father is a great newspaper man. And your new papa will start you
in the business of making public opinion. You will play with that, too,
but, then, you will be coining money.
No, not here in Chicago, but if you had talked to me at Sorrento as you
write me from your sanctum on the roof, I might have listened and
dreamed. The sea makes me believe and hope. I love it so! That's why I
made mamma take a house near the lake--to be near a little piece of
infinity. Yes, if you had paddled me out of the harbor at Sorrento,
some fine night when the swell was rippling in, like the groaning of a
sleepy beast, and the hills were a-hush on the shore, then we might
have gone on to that place you are so fond of, "the land east of the
sun, and west of the moon."