Literary Love-Letters | Page 6

did not remain forever in Italy, trying to say something new, and
that I began a definite task. I should send you my book (now that it is
out and people are talking about it), but it would bore you, and you
would feel that you must chatter about it. It is a good piece of
journeyman work. I gathered enough notes for another volume, and
then I grew restless. Business called me home for a few months, so I
came back to Chicago. Of all places! you say. Yes, to Chicago, to see
this brutal whirlpool as it spins and spins. It has fascinated me, I admit,
and I stay on--to live up among the chimneys, hanging out over the
cornice of a twelve-story building; to soak myself in the steam and
smoke of the prairie and in the noises of a city's commerce.
Am I content? Yes, when I am writing to you; or when the pile of
manuscripts at my side grows painfully page by page; or when, peering

out of the fort-like embrasure, I can see the sun drenched in smoke and
mist and the "sky-scrapers" gleam like the walls of a Colorado canon. I
have enough to buy me existence, and at thirty I still find peepholes
into hopes.
Are these enough facts for you? Shall I send you an inventory of my
room, of my days, of my mental furniture? Some long afternoon I will
spirit you up here in that little steel cage, and you shall peer out of my
window, tapping your restless feet, while you sniff at the squalor below.
You will move softly about, questioning the watercolors, the bits of
bric-à-brac, the dusty manuscripts, the dull red hangings, not quite
understanding the fox in his hole. You will gratefully catch the sounds
from the mound below our feet, and when you say good-by and drop
swiftly down those long stories you will gasp a little sigh of relief. You
will pull down your veil and drive off to an afternoon tea, feeling that
things as they are are very nice, and that a little Chicago mud is worth
all the clay of the studios. And I? I shall take the roses out of the vase
and throw them away. I shall say, "Enough!" But somehow you will
have left a suggestion of love about the place. I shall fancy that I still
hear your voice, which will be so far away dealing out banalities. I shall
treasure the words you let wander heedlessly out of the window. I shall
open my book and write, "To-day she came--beatissima hora."

NO. VII. OF THE NATURE OF A CONFESSION.
(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