Letters Home E-Book

William Dean Howells

• Herausgeber: Jazzybee Verlag
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Seitenzahl: 299

Beschreibung

A group of people from Boston and inland towns of Iowa and New York spent the three months between December and March, 1901 - 1902, in New York City for different reasons. Their "letters home" to various relations and friends tell an ingenious story. The fascination of the great city tells upon them all, and excellent descriptions of the turn-of-the-century New York appear in all the letters.

Leseprobe

Letters Home

WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS

Letters Home, W. D. Howells

Jazzybee Verlag Jürgen Beck

86450 Altenmünster, Loschberg 9

Deutschland

ISBN: 9783849657758

www.jazzybee-verlag.de

[email protected]

CONTENTS:

I.1

II.3

III.8

IV.10

V.13

VI.15

VII.16

VIII.18

IX.21

X.24

XI.27

XII.30

XIII.33

XIV.36

XV.39

XVI.42

XVII.43

XVIII.47

XIX.48

XX.51

XXI.54

XXII.56

XXIII.58

XXIV.59

XXV.61

XXVI.62

XXVII.65

XXVIII.65

XXIX.. 68

XXX.. 70

XXXI.73

XXXII.76

XXXIII.77

XXXIV.78

XXXV.83

XXXVI.87

XXXVII88

XXXVIII.92

XXXIX.93

XL.94

XLI.97

XLII.99

XLIII.100

XLIV.101

XLV.105

XLVI.106

XLVII114

XLVIII.118

XLIX.120

I.

 

From Mrs. Otis Binning to Mrs. Walter Binning, Boston.

New York, Dec. 12, 1901.

My Dear Margaret:

I am afraid it will not do, and that you will have your brother-in-law back on your hands again, for the winter, or lose him indefinitely. I do not mean, lose him to New York; far from that; as far as Europe, in fact; for if I were to take stock (the local commercialism instantly penetrates one's vocabulary) of my emotions, I suspect I should find myself evenly balanced between the impulse to board the next train for Boston and the impulse to board the next steamer for Liverpool. The things are about equally simple: the facilities for getting away from New York compensate for the facilities for getting to New York; and I could keep my promise of amusing your invalid leisure by letter as well from one place as from another. Wherever I am to be, I am not to be pitied as one taxed beyond his strength in keeping a rash promise. Your rest-cure may be good for you, or it may not; but for me I am sure it will be good if it gives me back that boon period of life, when T wrote letters willingly and wrote them long. I have already a pleasing prescience of an earlier time; in the mere purpose of writing you, I feel the glow of that charming adolescence of the world, in the eighteenth century, when everybody, no matter of what age, willingly wrote such long letters as to give the epistolary novel a happy air of verisimilitude.

I wish I could be more definite as to the reasons of my doubts whether I shall stay here or not. , Certainly the meteorological conditions have nothing to do with the matter. Up to the present date these have been the greatest amiability. About Thanksgiving there were some days of rough cold, which with our native climate still in my nerves, I expected to last for a week at least; but with the volatility of the New York nature, it all blew away in forty-eight hours. The like has happened several times since; a sort of corrupt warmth has succeeded the cold, affecting one as if the tissues of the season had broken down through sympathy with the municipal immorality. I should like to stay, if for nothing else, to see what the reformers will do in the way of an honest climate after they get into power at the end of the year, but I do not know whether I shall be able to do it. In the meantime, I like the mildness, though I can never get over my surprise at it; I enjoy it, as I suppose I should enjoy standing in with Tammany, in some enormously wicked deal that turned over half the streets to me for, say, automobile speedways, I had really forgotten what a Florentine sky New York often has in mid-December, by night and by day, with a suffusion of warm color from the sunsets, which is as different from the shrill pink of our Back Bay sunsets as the New York relaxation is from our moral tension. You have been here much later and oftener than I, and I dare say you take for granted all the unseasonable gentleness which I am finding so incredible, and so acceptable. But as yet I am not accustomed to it, and I have a bad conscience in celebrating it.

The whole place is filthier, with the pulling down and building up, the delving for the Rapid Transit, and I do not know what else, than I have seen it since poor Waring first taught Father Knickerbocker (as their newspaper cartoonists like to figure the city), the novelty of purging and living cleanly like a gentleman, and I suppose it is the sense of the invasive, pervasive dirt that has much to do with my doubt whether I can stand it. Now and then a rain comes and washes it all away, and makes the old sloven look endimanche, but the filth begins again with the first weekday, and you go about with your mouth and eyes full of malarious dust, as you did before. Of course, you will remind me that Boston is always pulling down and building up too; but her vices whiten into virtues beside New York's in that way. Then the noise, the noise! All the money from all the stocks and bonds centering their wealth into the place, cannot buy exemption from it. Boston is noisy, too, but there are large spaces in Boston where you can get fairly well away from the noise, and I know of none here, though there is said to be one block up and down next the Riverside Drive which is tolerably free from it; but no one that is any one lives there, for New York is in nothing more anomalous than in having the east side for her fashionable quarter. Everywhere the noise buffets you, insults you; and the horrible means of transit, that add so much to the danger and the dirt, burst your ears with their din.

I am no longer young, and I am not very well; you are quite right on both of these points; but I am not a dotard quite, or quite an invalid, and I do not exaggerate the facts which you beautiful creatures in your later forties make so light of. I fancy there is a dreadful solidarity in New York. I dare not trust myself to the climate, for instance, which I know is doing me good, for fear there is something behind it, something colossally uncertain and unreliable, and that later I shall pay with pneumonia for the relief from my nervous dyspepsia.

Just now, indeed, we are in one of those psychological moments when there ought to be great safety for me. The better element, as it diffidently calls itself, has been given charge of the city, you know, by the recent election, and the experiment of self-government is to be tried once more by people who have apparently so little interest in it. As nearly as I can make out from chance encounters at the Perennial Club (where Malkin has had me elected a non-resident member; he left town as soon as he had done it), there seems to be what I should call an unexpectation in the general mind: a willingness to take things as they come, to wait on providence in a semi-cynical resignation, which in the last analysis might prove a kind of piety. They have been reformed so frequently, these poor New Yorkers, and then unreformed, that they have rather fallen into the habit of taking the good with the bad as if it might turn out the bad. The newspapers keep shouting away, but that does not count; there are only two or three of them that are ever regarded seriously; and the people at the Perennial, who do not get their politics from London quite so entirely as some of our fellows, are very placid about the municipal situation. They seem to rely altogether on the men who have been put into office, and not the least on those who put them in; in fact the government of New York is almost as personal as that of Germany.

You can read this to Walter; and tell him that the Perennial is certainly a club to be put up at if you must come to New York. There are interesting heads, inside and out, here; the house is wonderfully cozy and incredibly quiet, an oasis in a desert of noise; and the windows look out over two miles of woodland in the Park, where I have already begun to take my walks. You will say, Here are the elements of a pleasant sojourn; and I do not deny it; but they are only the elements. The chemistry of their combination is wanting; and what I fear is that at the end of the winter, I should look back over my experience, and find in it nothing but the elements of a pleasant sojourn.

Yours affectionately,

Otis.

II.

From Wallace Ardith to A. Lincoln Wibbert, Office of THE DAY, Wottoma, Iowa.

New York, Dec. 15, 1901.

Dear Old Line:

It is simply glorious, there is no other word for it. I have to keep pinching myself, to make sure that it is not some other fellow; but if it be I as I hope it be, I've a little Line at home, and he'll know me — or words to that effect. So I will try to sober down and make the appeal to you. But I feel that it is an awful waste of time, for the subjects crowd upon you here, and what I give to friendship I take from literature. I want you to appreciate that.

It seems strange that it should be only three nights ago that I parted from you with that awful wrench in the dirty old depot at Wottoma, and took the sleeper for Chicago. Aeons of experience, swept down by deluges of emotion, have passed since then, and I feel older than the earth. I do not think I was very young then; I had gone through what is supposed to age a man, and if it had not been for you, and your sympathy in it all, I do not know what I should have done. But I believe I was wise to wait till I had a better excuse for running away than I had six months ago. I am all right, now, and I am all the better for being at a distance from a Certain Person. If you happen to see her, will you kiss my hand to her, very airily, and say, " Merci, ma chère "? If she asks you why, will you tell her that you have heard from W. A., and that his health is perfectly restored! Understand, Line, I don't blame her now, if I ever did; you will bear me witness that I would not let you do it. She had a perfect right to turn me down, but to turn me down for him, oh, that hurt! I could stand being near her (and yet so far!) but it was being within nose-pulling distance of him that I could not stand. I am glad that I came here to face the ghost down in the midst of men, instead of taking the woods, as I was tempted to do. It would have faced me down, if I had gone home, and it would have killed my poor old mother to see my hopeless lovesickness.

That's what I was, Line: love-sick, and now I am love-well and it is New York that has completed my cure. Or rather, she has inspired me with a new passion; she herself is my passion, and I will never leave to love her evermore! Radiant, peerless divinity, but majestic and awful too, her splendor dazzles me, her sovereign beauty enthralls me, her charm intoxicates, maddens me! What is any mortal girl to this apotheosis of Opportunity, this myriad-visaged Chance, this Fortune on a million wheels! There is more material in a minute here. Line, than there is in Wottoma in a year. I don't want to go back on the dear old place — or to it, as George Ade said about Indiana; but there is no Wottoma when you think of New York; it wipes itself from the map, and vanishes from the gazetteer.

You will never understand why till you come here, but you will come someday, and then you will know all about it. I was wishing to-night when I came out of the little French restaurant where I dine (it was the first time, but I am always going to dine there) that you could have been here to put your hand in mine, and walk up Broadway with me, just for one breath, one glimpse of it all. You would not have needed that dinner — six courses, with wine included, for fifty cents — warm under your waistcoat, to make you feel yourself not merely a witness of the great procession of life, but a part of it. By that time every one's work is over, and the people are streaming to the theatres, past the shining shops on foot, and cramming the trolleys, the women in furs and diamonds, and the men in crush hats and long overcoats, with just enough top buttons open to betray the dress tie and dress shirt. (I have laid in one of those majestic overcoats already, and I have got a silk hat, and I would like to show it to you in Wottoma, where you can't buy a silk hat unless you send to Chicago for it.) At the doors of the theatres, more gorgeous women and more correct men are getting out of hansoms, and coupés, and automobiles, and trailing in over the pavements between rows of resplendent darkeys in livery; and life is worth living. But when I begin anywhere on New York, I want to leave off and begin somewhere else, for the job is always hopeless. Take the Christmas streets alone, at three o'clock in the afternoon, and if you have a soul in you it soars sky-scraper high at the sight of the pavements packed with people, and the street jammed with cars, wagons, carriages, and every vehicle you can imagine, and many you can't, you poor old provincial! I ache to get at it all in verse; I want to write the Epic of New York, and I am going to. I would like to walk you down Twenty-third Street, between Fifth and Sixth avenues, and wake you up to the fact that you have got a country. Only you would think you were dreaming; and it is a dream. What impresses me most is the gratis exhibition that goes on all the time, the continuous performance of the streets that you could not get for money anywhere else, and that here is free to the poorest. In fact, is for the poor. There is one window on Fourteenth Street where the sidewalk is a solid mass of humanity from morning till night, entranced by the fairy scene inside; and most of the spectators look as if they had not been to breakfast or dinner, and were not going to supper. But they are enraptured; and that is the great secret of New York; she takes you out of yourself; she annihilates you and disperses you, and you might starve to death here without feeling hungry, for your mind wouldn't be on it. That is what convinces me that I have come to the best place for that little heart-cure.

This afternoon I was in the Park; my hotel is only a few blocks below it, and the woods called to me across the roofs, and I went. The sunset was dying over the Seventh Avenue entrance as I went in and as I tramped up past a big meadow where they pasture a flock of sheep, and crossed a bridge to a path that follows the border of a lake into what they call the Ramble, far from hoofs and wheels. The twilight was hovering in the naked tree tops, but the sunset was still reflected from the water among the trunks below, and just as I got to a little corner under the hill where there is a bust of Schiller on a plinth, between evergreens that try to curtain it, the red radiance glorified a pair of lovers tilting on the air above the path before me. He had his arm across her shoulders, and she had hers flung round his waist; I stopped, for I felt myself intruding, and that made them look round, and they started apart. Then, after they had taken a few steps, she closed upon Mm again, and with an action of angelic defiance, as if she said, " I don't care; suppose we are? " she flung her slim little arm round him, and ran him up the slope of the path past the bust, and round a rock out of sight. It was charming, Line, but it made me faint, and I dropped down on a bench beside an old fellow who might have been a fellow-sufferer, though he didn't look it. He was got up in things that reduced mine to an average value of thirty cents, and I saw that if I really meant business I must have a pair of drab gaiters inside of the next twenty-four hours. I don't know what made me think he was also literary, but I did, and I was flattered to have him speak to me after he had given me a glance over the shoulder next me, through his extremely polite pince-nez. He was clean shaven, except for the neat side whiskers, of the period of 1840-60, as you see them in the old pictures; and very rosy about the gills, with a small, sweet smile. You could see that he was his own ideal of a gentleman, and he looked as if he had been used to being one for several generations; at least, that was the way I romanced him; and perhaps that was why I felt flattered when he suggested, as if I would perfectly understand, " That was rather pretty. " I ventured to answer, " Yes, very pretty, indeed. " I was just thinking how old Schiller would have liked to wink the other eye of his bust there, and tell them he knew how it was himself. So I quoted —

" Ich habe genossen das irdische Glück,

Ich habe gelebt und geliebet. "

My quotation seemed to startle the old fellow, and he said " Ah! " and faced around at me, and asked with an irony that caressed, " Made in Germany? " I made bold to answer, " The verses were. I was made in Iowa." Then I felt rather flat, for having lugged in my autobiography, but he did not mind, or if he did, he only laughed, and remarked, " A thing like that would make a nice effect on the stage, if you could get it in. " " But you couldn't, " I said, " you could only get it into a poem. It would be gross and palpable on the stage. " " Was it gross and palpable here? " " No, here it was the real thing. " " I don't see the logic of your position, " he said. " I don't know that I could show it to you. It's something you must feel! " He laughed again, with the revelation of some very well-dentistried teeth, and said, " Well, let's hope that some time I may be fine enough to feel it. If I put it on the stage will it spoil it for a poem? " " Not if I get it into a poem first. " "I shouldn't object to that; I could dramatize the poem. Or perhaps you could. " He got up, and made me a beautiful bow, with his hat off. " We may be rivals, " he said, " but I hope we part friends? " and I got back with, " Oh, yes, or the best of enemies. "

That made him smile again, and he walked away down the path I had come. He might have been a fine old actor: he had the effect of " going off " at the end of the scene. But think of this happening to me all at once, and out of a clear sky, after the chronic poverty of incident in Wottoma! I suppose I shall never see him again, but once is enough to enrich the imagination with boundless possibilities. He had an English accent, but I feel sure that he was not English; they study that accent for the stage, of course.

Well, I might as well stop first as last, if this is first; I never should get through; and I should have to dispatch this letter in sections, like a big through train, if it went on much longer. Good-by. I shall not wait for you to write. It would kill me not to write, and you may expect something every day. Yours ever,

W. Ardith.

P. S. — I shall use that lovers incident in a story. Then I can get my unknown friend in, and I can make use of myself. I see a way to relate our common fortunes to those of the lovers. I believe I can make something out of it. But now I like to let it lie a silent joy in my soul — No, I don't believe I can risk waiting. That old fellow may be going to use the material at once. I believe I shall try making a poem of it, and if I hit it off, I will send you a copy to let you see what I have done with it. If I could only get that thing out as it is in my mind! I think I will imagine some old fellow, seeing in that pair of lovers the phantom of his own love, dead forty years. That would allow me to put in some Thackeray touches, (that elderly unknown was quite a Thackeray type,) and I could use my own experience with a Certain Person. Line, that girl looked just like a Certain Person: I mean her figure, so slight and light and electrical" and the way she glanced defiantly back at us over her shoulder, when she put her arm round him again!

III.

From Abner J. Baysley to Rev. William Baysley, Timber Creek, Iowa.

New York, December 19, 1901.

Dear Brother:

Yours of the 15th received, and contents noted. Would say that we are all usually well, and getting used to our life here as well as we can. It is worse for wife and I than it is for the girls, but I guess they are a little homesick, too. Am not sure but what it is worse for them, because the girls have not much to do, and mother and me are pretty well taken up, her with her housekeeping, and me getting settled in the business here, and feeling anxious whether I can make it go or not. When the company offered me the place here, at $2,600, I thought it was a fortune, but money does not go quite so far in New York as what it would in Timber Creek; I have to pay forty dollars a month for rent alone, and we live in a six-room flat, with two of the rooms so dark that we have to bum gas in them by day, and gas costs. But the kitchen is sunny, and Ma likes that. We set there of an evening when the girls are carrying on in the parlor, with their music, and try to make ourselves believe that we are in the old home-kitchen at Timber Creek; but with a gas range it is difficult. Was you really thinking of renting the old place? Would let you have it on easy terms. I can't bear to think of it standing empty the whole winter long. Would say, go into it, William, and welcome, for anything you are a mind to pay. If you didn't mean that, all right; Ma thought maybe you did. I know your wife would use it well. Would say, you can have the horse over the winter for his keep, and if you can sell him for anything in the spring, will allow you a fair percentage. I know you will do the best you can for me. Perhaps Watson will take him off your hands; he wanted a horse.

My, but it brings the old place up to talk about these things! But a man can't afford to indulge in much sentiment if he expects to get along in New York. He has got to be business from the word go. I try to push things all I can, but sometimes, William, I am most afraid I am getting too old for it, and if the company finds that out it will be all day with me. A trust has no bowels, but I don't blame them, I suppose I should be just so myself. William do you ever think people live too long? There, you will say, he is flying in the face of providence, and the Lord knows I don't mean to, but am thankful for all my blessings. I don't know how ma and the girls could get along without me, old as I am, in this awful city, or me without them for that matter. The girls have not got acquainted much, if any, yet. It is not very sociable here. We have been in this house nearly two weeks, and although as much as twenty families live above and below us, in the six stories, nobody has called. Well its like this, its more like living in the same street than what it is in the same house, but in Timber Creek we wouldn't have been in the same street or hardly in the same town without pretty much everybody calling inside of two weeks. But the girls say they like it, and that it gives them more of a chance to choose their own acquaintance. Speaking of acquaintance, they say that New-Yorkers never meet each other on the street, but if two country fellows happen to be in New York at the same time they are sure to bump against each other before the day's out. And that is just exactly what happened to me this morning in Broadway. You remember the Widow Ardith's boy that went onto the paper in Wottoma? Well, who should I run right into but him day before yesterday, just off the train with his grip in his hand. I told him to come round, and he said he would, the first chance he got, and its fired the girls all up, the idea of a gentleman caller. He always did dress pretty well when he come home from Wottoma on a visit, and he was looking just out of a bandbox, though he never was anyways stuck up. If we could get him for a boarder or to take one of the rooms it would help out considerable, but the girls said they would have my scalp if I dared to hint at such a thing to him, so I am going to lay low. Would say, take the old place William, and if you cannot afford to pay any rent till you have disposed of your house, all right; you can have it for nothing till then. I know you must be uncomfortable where you are, so far from your church, especially evening meetings. You could send us some of the apples. One of them old Bambos or Sheeps Noses would taste good. Ma and the girls joins me in love to you and Emmeline. When you write give our love to the rest of your family. I hope Sally is getting along all right.

To think of you being a grandfather before me when so much younger, but so it goes.

Your affectionate brother,

Ab.

IV.

From Miss America Ralson to Miss Caroline

Descheites, Wottoma.

My Dearest Caro:

I owe you a great many apologies for not writing before this, but if you only knew all I have been through you would not ask for a single one. I thought it was bad enough when we got here late in the spring after everybody one knows had gone out of town, but since the season began this fall it has been simply a whirl. It began with the Horse Show, of course, and now we are in the midst of the Dog Show which opened to-day with twelve hundred dogs; and I thought I should go insane with their barking all at once, and when I got mother home, I was afraid she was going to be down ill. But in New York you have got to get used to things, and that is what I keep telling mother, or else go back to Wottoma, where she never put her nose out of the house once in a month, and went to bed every night at nine. After the Dog Show there will not be much of anything till the opera begins. Father has taken a box for the nights when the owner does not go, and it is going to cost him a thousand dollars for the time he has it.

We have had a great many cards already, and invitations to Teas and At Homes; they seem to be the great thing in New York, and I think it is just as well to begin that way till we know the ropes a little better. You may be in society all your life in Wottoma, and yet you have got to go slow in New York. We have been to one dinner at a gentleman's that father was thrown with in business, but they seemed to think we did not want to meet anybody but Western people; and there was nothing about it in the society column. Father had a good time, for he always takes his good time with him, and the lady and her daughter were as pleasant to me as could be; mother could not be got to go; but I did not come to New York to meet Western people, and I shall think over the next invitation we get from that house. They are in the Social Register, and so I suppose they are all right themselves, but if it had not been for a crowd of people that came in after dinner, I should not have thought they knew anybody but strangers. I should say nearly all of these after-dinner people were New-Yorkers; there is something about the New York way of dressing and talking that makes you know them at once as far as you can see them. I had some introductions, but I did not catch the names any of the time, and I could not ask for them the way father does, so I did not know who I was talking with.

They all seemed to talk about the theatre, and that was lucky for me, because you know I am so fond of it, and I have been to nearly everything since the season began: Irving, of course, and Maude Adams, and John Drew, and " Colorado, " and " Way Down East, " and " Eben Holden, " and I don't know what all. Father likes one thing and I like another, and so we get in pretty much all the shows. We always take a box, and that gives father practice in wearing his dress suit every night for dinner; I could hardly get him to at first; and he kept wearing his derby hat with his frock coat till I had to hide it, and now I have to hide his sack-coats to keep him from wearing them with his top-hat.

Now, Caro, I know you will laugh, but I will let you all you want to; and I am not going to put on any airs with you, for you would know they were airs the minute you saw them. We do bump along in New York, but we are going to get there all the same, and we mean to have fun out of it on the way. Mother don't because it is not her nature to, like father's and mine. She still thinks we are going to pay for it, somehow, if we have fun, but that is only the New England in her, and does not really mean anything; as I tell her, she was not bred in Old Kentucky, but brown bread and baked beans in Old Massachusetts, and if ever she is born again it will be in South Beading. The fact of it is she is lonely, with father and me out so much, and I am trying to make her believe that she ought to have a companion, who can sit with her, and read to her, and chipper her up when we go out. I need someone myself to write notes for me, and my idea is that we can make one hand wash another by having someone to be a companion for mother who can be a chaperon for me when father cannot go with me. We have advertised, and we shall soon see whether the many in one that we want will appear.

If she will only appear, money will not stand in her way, for we are long on money whatever we are short on. Father is almost as much puzzled in New York as he was in Wottoma how to spend his income. I am doing my best to show him, and when we begin to build, in the spring, I guess the architect will give him some instructions. His plans do more than anything else to keep mother in good spirits, and he has made her believe she made them. He has made father believe he owns him, and I thought maybe I did till he let out one day that there was someone else. Well, you can't have everything in this world, and I shall try to rub along.

How would you like to have me rub along with a cast-off shoe of yours? Not Mr. Ardith! Yes, Mr. Ardith! He turned up here, last night about dinner time, and we saw him wandering round with a waiter, looking for a vacant' table, and trying to pretend that he was not afraid, when anyone could see that the poor boy's heart was in his mouth. The fright made him look more refined than ever with that cleanshaven face of his, and his pretty, pointed chin, and his nice little mouth. He was so scared that he did not know us, though he was staring straight at us, till father got up and sort of bulged down on him, and shouted out, " Well, Wottoma, every time! " And in about a second, Mr. Ardith was sitting opposite me, with a napkin across his knees, and talking his soup cold under the latest news from home. Well, Caro, it was like some of the old South High Street times, and it made me homesick to hear all the old names. And what do you think father did after dinner? He made Mr. Ardith come up to our rooms, and the first thing I knew he was asking him how he would like to go to the theatre with us, if he had nothing better to do. He made a failure of trying to think of something, and the next thing I knew, father was bending over us in the box after the first act, with a hand on a shoulder apiece of us, (have I got that straight?) and asking us if we minded his going, and letting us get home at our convenience. I looked up and tried to frown him still, but it was no use. He just said, " I'll send the carriage back for you, Make, " and went.

I don't believe Mr. Ardith knew there was anything unusual in it, and I never let on. I hurried up the talk, and we talked pure literature. I saw I was in for it, and I tried to make him believe that I had read all the latest publications, and was taking a course of George Meredith between times. After while he began to hint round after you, Caro: he did, honest! He said he supposed I heard from you, and I said, very rarely; you must be so much taken up with the Wottoma gayeties. He may have merely asked about you for a bluff, and to show that he was not going to ask. He went on and talked a little more about you, kind of with a ten-foot pole, and getting further and further off all the time, till he got clear to New York, and then he talked about nothing but New York. He is crazy about the place, and sees it as a poem, he says; goodness knows what he means! He got quite up into the clouds, and he did not come down again till we reached home.

I saw that he wanted to do the handsome thing, and I allowed him to order some expensive food at the table we usually take, for I knew that it would hurt his pride if I didn't. He seemed to have a good appetite, but he went on more psychologically than ever, and I was never so glad as when he said goodnight to me at our door — except when father wanted him to come in, and he wouldn't. Yes, Caro, Mr. Ardith is too many for me, but I respect him, and if I could scratch up a little more culture perhaps I could more than respect him. He certainly is a nice boy.

We shall probably be at the Walhondia, the whole winter. You see life here, and although it is not exactly the kind of New York life that I am after, it is New York life, because it's all strangers, I would like you to see it once, and why couldn't you come on and pay me that visit? I would like nothing better than to blow in a few thousand on a show for you, and ask the Four Hundred to meet you. Father would believe they all came, and he would like the blowing-in anyway. He is not going to die disgraced, as Mr. Carnegie says, and he can't die poor if the Trust keeps soaring as it has for the last six months. Better come, Caro, for perhaps when we get into our new house on the East Side next winter, I may not want you, and now I do want you. Come! I'll give a little theatre dinner for you, and I'll ask Mr. Ardith. There!

As we used to say when we thought we knew French,

Toute a, vous.

Make.

New York, December the Eighteenth, Nineteen Hundred and One.

V.

From Miss Frances Dennam to Mrs. Ansel Gr. Dennam, Lake Ridge, New York.

New York, Dec. 19, 1901.

Dear Mother: