Do you know that I still keep a record of these undying pa.s.sions of mine with a picture of each culprit attached, and Carlton is 999. I thought, when I was sixteen, I would record the one divine fire that was like to consume me, and now I have eighteen volumes of this 105-degrees-in-the-shade literature, all bound alike in a perfect _edition de luxe_. I'd rather regret what I have done than what I have not done. You dear old ostrich, I can hear you sigh over me, but don't you waste your gasoline. You, too, should have callouses on your emotions by this time.

Bunky and Oth.e.l.lo have both decided to bark at my chemiselets and skirtlets in one,--maybe they think they are too flossy to be concealed.

I agree there.

Phyllis Lathop's lawyer, Mr. Maryan Soe Early, got her decree for her last week and she flew back on the 3.30 train to Manhattan and Gordon Booth. Of course everyone knows that he is booked.

Her plea was extreme cruelty; said her husband struck her. The dear old judge asked her to explain in detail some of the circ.u.mstances of her husband's brutality. She said: "While crossing Lake Michigan there was a terrible storm on, and as my husband was descending from the upper berth, the boat lurched and he struck me with his elbow." Phyllis said the judge smiled very broadly and gave her her decree on "Extreme Nerve," instead of "Extreme Cruelty."

She writes that she and Gordon are having such times together--batting around their old stamping ground, Bronx Park--strange how hard it is to overcome habits. They slink off to the New York woman's trysting place when there is no longer any reason for secrecy. One bitter cold day last winter Bern and I met Phyllis and Gordon in the very spot that we always frequented, and poor individuals were stamping their feet to keep them from freezing. The monkey house was full of people and they dared not remain there any longer. We all smiled as much as to say: "You don't tell, and I certainly won't." Not a word ever came out, so the treaty was well kept. Bern and I were more or less engaged at the time.

We laughed over it when she was out here, and I asked her why she never repeated it, as she never keeps anything to her gossipy self. She answered: "If I had said that I had seen you there, I would have had to explain my own presence in the park, and I never incriminate myself."

She says that "there are two new kinds of monkeys out there and one looks like Elbert Hubbard--sits all day surrounded by his hair."

She's running a bar in connection with her tea table now, which is equivalent to putting salt on the tail of the social male bird. She can hardly believe that she's free, and says that it will take some time for her to realize "that there aint no beast." Isn't it strange that the most fascinating lover in the world can turn into the veriest beast within six months after he has. .h.i.t you on the head and dragged you senseless into his Fifth Avenue home? Of course you're senseless or you would not have tied up.

Phyllis says that she has gotten out of the habit of decent food, that every time she really dines, she gets strange pains in her underneath. I wish I could fly back home, but I must grit my teeth and get rid of my beast too. I wonder which breed I'll try next time. Boston Bull, I suppose, I think that's where Carlton was first kenneled.

I have a large stove in my sitting-room and keep it going myself.

Oth.e.l.lo looks as though he'd laugh himself to death every time I put coal on--darn his pelt! He's crazy over Sioux Falls--possibly because there are seven dogs to the city block. He goes away on bridal tours every few days and then I have to get out a search warrant. I could live quite decently if I did not have to invest in so many rewards for him.

It is so terribly cold here that my very thoughts are frozen and my hot-water bag does nightly service. The thing sprung a leak last week and I took it to a garage to ask if they would mend it, and the fellow answered: "Certainly, madam, we have quite a trade in hot-water bottles and "nature's rivals."" I have also found out that the only place to buy burnt wood is at Mr. Trepaning's the undertaker and embalmer.

All the stiff and crackling branches of the trees are weighted down with a three-inch ruching of snow. It is all silently fascinating, especially so because since starting this letter two short raps at my window announce Carlton who comes each night to accompany me to the late post after the landlady is snoozing. His arms are around me as I scrawl, and the thousand tiny little thrills that answer so eagerly to his nearness, a.s.sure me that it is not deplorable to be thirty-nine.

Good night, MARIANNE.

December 20.

So near Xmas, dear, yet none of the Yule-tide joys float out to this frozen wilderness. Snow, snow everywhere. The tall alders, whose vivid coloring so inspired me when I arrived, are now black and gaunt, and the pitiless desert wind comes tearing and howling from the north to bend and crack their stiffened joints. I often wonder--am I any more the arbiter of my fate than these lifeless snow-draped spectres around me.

Carlton left the hotel almost a week ago and took the room next to mine.

We are hopelessly in love with each other, and he wonders how he ever could have thought of accepting happiness from Mrs. Claymore, accompanied by so many freckles and a half million dollars.

As for Bern, dear, he will survive. I am much older than he is, so that some day he would be forty with all his emotions and I would be fifty with the rheumatism--it would never do. Henceforth I shall be prodigal of negatives, except where Carlton is concerned.

We have attained the intimacy which thinks aloud, and instead of hating Sioux Falls and longing for my sentence to expire, I am beginning to worship every inch of the ground, and only pray that such an exile should last forever.

None of the fulminating fires that I have heretofore known are mine--only calm and peace and the joys born of a perfect understanding.

We have not let the moment slip when souls meet in comprehension. I almost decided not to confide all this to you, but it slipped off my pen and I'm not sorry, for no woman living was ever before blessed with a friend like you. You and I have visited the lowest Dantesque circles of despair together, and no confidence between us could amount to an indiscretion.

Our landlady thinks that we are merely speaking acquaintances, and it is best, as this new-found sympathy must not be distilled by Sioux Falls scandal-mongers, though I should like to shout it from the house tops through a megaphone, I am so happy and proud of it.

So you shot with Aldrich and he tried to get you to buy "Steel Preferred." I am glad you did not invest and sorry you did not win the cup. I shall never again shoot for pleasure. I am ashamed of my trophies. Perhaps love has made me mushy but I don't regret it as hate made me flinty. Have you noticed how our bonds have slumped--the whole thing was a Golden Fleece. Commercialism bores me to extinction. I suppose the world began with trade, since Adam sold Paradise for a pippin.

Are you still of the opinion that tradespeople should be branded on the forehead down to the third generation?--you dear sn.o.bbish treasure.

Henceforth I shall only deal in sentimental tramways and have shares in the moral funds--maybe not moral according to the threadbare ideal of the genus _h.o.m.o sapiens_.

Surprising that a girl as young as Alice Noah--no relation to the fellow who built the ark--should just take out legal separation papers in New York. How can the _modus vivendi_ suit her better than divorce? Perhaps she wants to cinch her alimony until she finds another affinity. Then Alice for Dakota. It is foolish to cut your financial string when you might just as well dangle, especially until you find something worth dropping for.

Dear, will you please send me a reel of Sirdars? I can't smoke anything else and no one sells them out here. Our landlady has one eye that looks up the chimney and another that goes cellar wards and Carlton says that she always regards him obliquely--never mind, she is a good stupid soul and I can forgive a landlady anything but perspicacity. I don't see how our intimacy has escaped her,--to me it looks like the first foreign sticker on an American five dollar dress suit case.

Why do you write such short letters? Is it because you have but a limited number of ideas and must dispense them carefully?

What did Philip Leighton die of? His wife, I suppose. They never had anything in common but the kiddies. That means no more hunts at Blackburn Heath unless someone careless like Philip absorbs the estate.

Mrs. Philip was a Pennsylvania girl. _N'est ce pas?_ That accounts for her effulgent spontaneity. Isn't it a shame for me to wax bombastic over a girl who, if she were just a little brighter, might be called half witted. She's the girl with the ma.s.sive mother, who suffers from dislocated adjectives. They say when she was married her prayer book was missing, so she carried a cake of ivory soap instead--The mother was divorced and could have had alimony if she had wanted it, but she had better sense than to want it. She has venomous optics--the fellows used to say they flew when she flashed her calciums; ugly as the seven deadly sins and so mannish that I was always afraid her trousers would show beneath her petticoats. The giddy old cat! If she had been hanging since her sixtieth birthday, she would certainly be breathless now.

All day, dear, I go about my duties with a most ladylike absence of pa.s.sion, but when night comes I cross the sandy waste of the past and stretch out my hands to fondle the idea of perfect companionship. Our thoughts seem to be a reverberation of the same thunderous roll, and while they are not identical, they are of the same breadth and elevation. The conditions of propinquity are responsible; and as love did not come to me, I had to do as Mahomet did with the mountain.

When he goes from me, Joy vanishes, but leaves a bright track of light behind, which bursts upon me through the clouds of cigarette smoke that he has left.

Each day I awaken more warmed and thrilled, like the sun which finds the mountain tops that he touched with his departing rays still warm when he sends his shaft of light in the morn.

No maelstrom of distrust do we feel, only a mighty, overpowering pa.s.sion that no undress of intimacy can ever destroy.

Good-night, friend of my babyhood, my girlhood, my womanhood. My greetings for your birthday.

Affy, MARIANNE.

February 10.

Don't be cross with me, dear, I am in no danger. Your repeated letters came--I read them, then straightway forgot that they should be answered.

It is no evidence of a lessening of my love for you, but because life has become so mysteriously perfect for me that I dream away my hours.

One night, seemingly a million years ago, but really only within the present week, I felt cold as I stood by my stove and plaited my hair--I have nice hair, Lorna, haven't I? But I didn't seem to notice it. I was in my nightie and I shivered. My white chiffon bedspread with the pink roses strewn over it was near, so I drew it close about me and felt that I had protected myself from the chill. It wasn't an external chill that made me quake, but something old and deep-rooted and lonely that came from the depths of the soul in me and begged and pleaded for recognition.

The big stove with its dozens of mica eyes threw out comforting little rays of coziness, but the real me still shivered. I walked to the window and opened it. Strange, disquieting, but gracious thoughts that I had lost somewhere in the twilight of the night before, came riding back to me on a snow flurry--it was so still that I feared to breathe, lest I disturb the solitude--the sky wasn't heavy and gray, but clear and blue and seemed like a soft silken canopy that the gaunt maples upheld to protect me and my love, and the virgin snow that fell on my outstretched arms in soft little rosettes that disappeared as our loves sometimes do when they have but let us feel the deliciousness of their possession.

The heavy old door between my room and his creaked with rustiness and age, as for the first time in years it turned upon its hinges. Carlton had watched for my last good-night signal and grew alarmed at its absence and my quietude.

I wonder why I didn't feel embarra.s.sed--all I know is that after he discovered a comfortable angle in my Morris, I crawled into his arms and lay there quietly without a word until dawn the next morning. Our sleep was rhythmic, just like our love. What a strange beautiful night we pa.s.sed and how difficult it would be to make the world believe!

Awakening, I felt something cold around my neck, and there, dear girl, he had fastened pearls while I slept in his arms. I cannot even imagine their value, as I know nothing of jewels but how to accept and wear them.

Such a gift is wonderful at any time, but how much more subtly charming to have it fastened on you as you lay, comfy and subconscious in his strong and doubtless aching arms. Such peace, peace, dear, would have benumbed Napoleon; but I need few other interests--my universe begins at his head and ends at his feet.

This is the purest jag of joy that I have ever been on in my life, and I wonder that one small blonde woman is able to allow herself so much spark and not have her engines explode.

I always fancied that I should die if such an ideal existence even attempted to show its face to me; and instead, I take my soup before it's cold, put my shoes on my feet, my hat on my head, retire and arise at the usual hours.

He embroiders his talk with bungalows, steam yachts and motor cars for the future, while I fear to buy a pair of boots before a consultation with my trousers pocket. I find myself imprisoned in a banker's portfolio, floundering in statements covered with red ink. He doesn't dream that such is the case, or all his funds would be at my disposal.

Somehow, if I had my decree, I should tell him; but while I am still someone's else wife I cannot take his money--it would soil my emotions.