It is a long time since I wrote to you, but neither have you been quite
so zealous a correspondent this summer, so it is tit for tat.
I often think of you, and wonder how you are really getting on in your
solitude. Whether you have been living in the country and going up to
town daily? Or if, like most of the "devoted husbands," you still only
run down to the cottage for week-ends?
If I were not absolutely free from jealousy, in any form, I should envy
you your new car. This neighbourhood is charming, but to explore it in a
hired carriage, lined with dirty velvet, does not attract me. Now, dear
friend, don't go and send off car and chauffeur post-haste to me. That
would be like your good nature. But, of course, I am only joking.
Send me all the news of the town. I read the papers diligently, but
there are items of interest which do not appear in the papers! Above
all, tell me how things are going with Lillie. Will she soon be coming
home? Do you think her conduct was much talked of outside her own
circle? People chatter, but they soon forget.
Homes for nervous cases are all very well in their way; but I think our
good Hermann Rothe went to extremes when he sent her to one. He is
furious with me, because I told him what I thought in plain words.
Naturally he did not in the least understand what I was driving at. But
I think I made him see that Lillie had never been faithless to him in
the physiological meaning of the word--and that is all that matters to
men of his stamp.
I am convinced that Lillie would not have suffered half so much if she
had really been unfaithful in the ordinary sense.
But to return to me and my affairs.
You cannot imagine what a wonderful business-woman the world has lost in
me. Not only have I made both ends meet--I, who used to dread my
Christmas bills--but I have so much to the good in solid coin of the
realm that I could fill a dozen pairs of stockings. And I keep my
accounts--think of that, Richard! Every Monday morning Torp appears with
her slate and account-book, and they must balance to a farthing.
I bathe once or twice a day from my cosey little hut at the end of the
garden, and in the evening I row about in my little white boat.
Everything here is so neat and refined that I am sure your fastidious
soul would rejoice to see it. Here I never bring in any mud on my shoes,
as I used to do in the country, to your everlasting worry. And here the
books are arranged tidily in proper order on the shelves. You would not
be able to find a speck of dust on the furniture.
Of course the gardener from Frijsenborg, about whom I have already told
you, is now courting Torp, and I am expecting an invitation to the
wedding one of these next days. Otherwise he is very competent, and my
vegetables are beyond criticism.
Personally, I should have liked to rear chickens, but Torp is so
afflicted at the idea of poultry-fleas that she implored me not to keep
fowls. Now we get them from the schoolmaster who cannot supply us with
all we want.