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 presented to the 
 
 LIBRARY 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SAN DIEGO 
 
 by 
 FRIENDS OF THE LIBRARY 
 
 Ward L. Thornton
 
 LETTERS FROM 
 G. G. 
 
 "I so love life, for the sake of life, 
 
 And breath for the love of breath, 
 A song for the splendid sake of song, 
 A word for what it saith. 
 
 "For no far end, no gain, no pleasure, 
 
 Nor good that comes thereof : 
 But measured words just for worded 
 
 measure 
 I love for the sake of love." 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 
 1909
 
 COPYRIGHT, 1909 
 
 BY 
 HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 
 
 Published October, 1909
 
 LETTERS FROM G. G. 
 
 PROLOGUE 
 
 THERE was a Nice Girl who once spent a 
 winter in Paris at a pension, and next her at 
 table chanced to sit a Youth. He was a very 
 Superior Person, very positive, very toplofty, 
 and he had some excuse, for he was Unus- 
 ually Intelligent. 
 
 One day he undertook to snub the Girl 
 that is, he contradicted her, and treated her 
 in general as if she were a part of the pattern 
 of the wall-paper. 
 
 The Girl was unused to that sort of thing, 
 and was breathless with surprise. People 
 were not given to snubbing her, partly because 
 she was so Very Nice, and also because she 
 had a tongue which could be sharp on occa- 
 sion. 
 
 i
 
 2 Letters from G. G. 
 
 She reasoned the case with herself: One 
 of two things must happen either she must 
 sit upon that Young Man so hard that he 
 would never recover, or she must be so nice 
 that he would never do it again. 
 
 Either alternative was easy, but one was a 
 little the more agreeable, so she gulped hard, 
 and was nice for two whole weeks, to very 
 good effect, for the night before the Youth 
 left Paris he spent the entire evening telling 
 her how very much he liked her. 
 
 By that time the Girl had discovered that 
 he was quite exceptionally amusing, and they 
 agreed that though here their paths diverged, 
 yet they would not entirely lose track of each 
 other that is, they would write. 
 
 They wrote at intervals more or less short 
 for two years. Then the opportunity offered 
 of their meeting again. But meanwhile they 
 had grown such good friends on paper that 
 they decided that a renewal of personal ac- 
 quaintance would be a risk. Their letters were 
 so eminently satisfactory that they doubted
 
 Letters from G. G. 3 
 
 whether they would find each other as entirely 
 delightful, and thought it wisest to let well 
 alone. 
 
 More years passed, making them only better 
 friends. They had almost forgotten one an- 
 other as real people, and each thought of the 
 other as a friendly Myth or Shadow from 
 whom it was good to hear, and to whom it was 
 very pleasant to give all one's real opinions 
 about things. 
 
 They wrote ... of what did they not 
 write? They wrote of Love and Life and 
 Death; of Dogs, of themselves, and one an- 
 other; of Mice and Men and Modern In- 
 stances ; of trifles light as air ; of all that one 
 does and hears in the course of the day's work, 
 and hands on because it means a laugh or a 
 tear ; of all that goes to make people and their 
 lives. 
 
 They reveled in the rarity of a friendship 
 which seemed like to become lifelong, based 
 on letters alone barring the two little weeks 
 of their knowledge of each other face to face.
 
 4 Letters from G. G. 
 
 They enjoyed the Game, and agreed that to 
 meet again in the light of common day would 
 be stupid and obvious and commonplace. 
 
 And so they wrote until . . . but you 
 shall read. Don't be alarmed . . . not 
 until they died. They are still alive and writ- 
 ing.
 
 LETTERS FROM G. G. 
 
 FROM G. G. IN PARIS, TO R. F. IN NAPLES. 
 
 Spring. 
 
 I am not, as you suggest, "of those who 
 make promises but to break them," and I pro- 
 pose to make you very sorry for your intima- 
 tion of lack of good faith on my part. Shortly 
 after you left Paris I fell ill very, very, very 
 ill. I am at this moment propped up in 
 bed, making a special and uncomfortable 
 effort. Writing sick abed isn't a bit of fun. 
 But you say you are sailing for home by the 
 end of the week, so if word is to reach you in 
 Naples at all, it must go now, or you will go 
 to your grave thinking me faithless, for I 
 don't believe you would bend your proud pen 
 to writing a third time in the teeth of silence. 
 
 It seems long ago that we were neigh- 
 bors at table for those two good weeks 
 5
 
 6 Letters from G. G. 
 
 at the pension; that we heard music together 
 (weren't those good performances of Fidelio 
 and Boheme at the Comique ! ) ; that we 
 danced and discussed and walked and saw 
 pictures. Even then I was a bit shaky. I 
 wondered at times if I should weather the sea- 
 son safely, the chill of Paris winter struck so 
 at the marrow of me. How I do hate cold! 
 And the jaunt across the river to the atelier 
 every morning, at misty peep o' day, to be on 
 time for my criticism was a pretty wearing 
 business, that, and the feverishly hard work. 
 I wanted to do so much in the time I had. 
 
 Well, you left !in February, didn't you? 
 Middle of March I went to pieces grippe, 
 pneumonia, general smash. It wasn't nice. 
 I almost went mad at the pension. There 
 was a girl in the next room who sang the most 
 heartrending exercises, and tramped about her 
 bare floor industriously in calfskin boots. 
 My doctor the dear Lord bless him! saw 
 that if I didn't die of what ailed me, I'd go to 
 a lunatic asylum before he could get me well.
 
 Letters from G. G. 7 
 
 So one day he came with a rubber-tired cab, 
 had me packed in oiled silk and blankets and 
 hot-water bottles, and took me to his mother's 
 house. This mother was one of my mother's 
 oldest and dearest friends, and when we were 
 youngsters, he such a thoughtful, kind boy 
 and I a toddler, we played about in the Tuil- 
 eries and Champs Elysees together with our 
 bonnes. And his dear mother has taken me 
 in and done for me what my mother would 
 have done for him had the situation been re- 
 versed. 
 
 I was horribly ill, but I'm getting well, and 
 when it is all over there will be much that is 
 lovely to remember. The dear kindness of 
 these sweet people for it is no joke having a 
 sick girl suddenly plumped down into one's 
 quiet, well-regulated household. 
 
 Good-by. I envy you so soon to be on 
 your way home. Greet it for me. Greet 
 home. Greet me America. Greet me Mile. 
 Liberte in the harbor. Greet me New York. 
 
 G. G.
 
 8 Letters from G. G. 
 
 FROM G. G. IN PARIS, TO R. F. AT HOME IN A 
 CHICAGO SUBURB. 
 
 Spring. 
 
 You see, I'm still here, but it is Italy next 
 week. Convalescence is mighty pleasant. 
 When, except after an illness, can one hope to 
 feel so babyishly irresponsible? Kitty (one of 
 my sisters who was sent for) does everything 
 but breathe for me. I wish she could manage 
 to do that, for I don't yet find it perfectly 
 comfortable to do for myself. She thinks 
 and acts and speaks for me. I am ashamed 
 making her all this fuss and worry, coming 
 over here to nurse me well, but it is such bliss 
 having her around with nothing but me to oc- 
 cupy her mind and person. It makes me 
 think of a verse of hers: 
 
 To be a little child once more, 
 And in its dreamless cradle lie, 
 
 And hear a soft voice o'er and o'er 
 Refraining: "Bylow, baby bye."
 
 Letters from G. G. 
 
 To be a child, be innocence 
 
 Of all that hath man's heart beguiled, 
 Yet know by some mysterious sense, 
 
 How good it is to be a child! 
 
 That is it after a great big illness it is like 
 being a child, yet realizing, which one doesn't 
 as a child, the fun that it is. 
 
 And then, after being very ill, one makes a 
 fresh start. All the troublesome things of be- 
 fore are washed away, or sink back into their 
 proper perspective. I don't suppose you sus- 
 pected while we so gaily chattered in those 
 days that I was mightily bothered about 
 things. So little does one know what goes on 
 under one's neighbor's blond hair. 
 
 Well, I feel strangely shut of it all now, and 
 troubled conscience and sorriness for myself 
 have all melted and floated away. I find it 
 painfully easy to laugh. You might, for in- 
 stance, not be accustomed to thinking of Tho- 
 reau as a humorous writer, but Kitty had to 
 stop in the middle of reading Walden aloud 
 to me ; we went into such gales over it that my
 
 io Letters from G. G. 
 
 ridiculous, incompetent lungs couldn't stand 
 the shaking up. I was sent into such spasms 
 of coughing that it didn't do. 
 
 It's all right chanting the delights of con- 
 valescence, but it's slow so slow! and I 
 want to be well now! G. G. 
 
 FROM G. G. AT MONTORO, NEAR FLORENCE. 
 TO R. F. AT HOME. 
 
 Summer. 
 
 You were in Florence so lately that it is use- 
 less to rave to you about the place, to pile su- 
 perlative upon superlative. But isn't it the 
 dearest ever? 
 
 I've not been back since I was a child here 
 in boarding-school and it's amazing how well 
 I remember it all. I could find my way about 
 blindfold, only it all looked so big and spacious 
 to my child eyes, and how tiny it really is! 
 One can put a girdle around the city in twenty 
 minutes in a cab, and cab-horses aren't racers 
 in this country, as you know poor dears ! 
 
 While you were here, did you come out in
 
 Letters from G. G. 11 
 
 this direction? Did you hear of the Villa 
 Montoro? I believe it is the most beauti- 
 ful place in the world. Italy is indisputably 
 the most adorable country on earth, Florence 
 its fairest city, and Montoro avowedly the 
 loveliest villa in Tuscany ! . . . ! 
 
 There is a view from the end of the bowling 
 green . . . But what's the use? It is so 
 perfect that you can pick out no special fea- 
 ture to describe. Down there in the valley 
 lies Florence, sun-saturated in a baby-blue 
 haze, the Duomo rising waist high above the 
 houses, and all about misty stretches of hill 
 and valley, gray-green of olive orchards, ac- 
 centuated with rows of black cypress and 
 dotted with creamy villas and peasant houses 
 with pinky-red tiled roofs. The whole so un- 
 consciously right, as right as a daisy field. 
 
 But soon we shall be leaving this paradise 
 and the enchanted life here for home, and I'm 
 not sorry, though I don't mean by that to be 
 ungrateful to our lovely hostess. But I'd 
 rather be at home than in heaven any day,
 
 12 Letters from G. G. 
 
 wouldn't you? Aren't you glad you are at 
 home ? You don't seem glad enough, yet your 
 new quarters sound mighty attractive. The 
 study you are building sounds a comfy lit- 
 tle hole. How glorious to be able to do things 
 on such a gorgeous scale! 
 
 You don't seem to dote on your avocation 
 of grain merchant, yet I should judge it had 
 its compensations, when it enables one to line 
 one's nest with Rodin statuary and Besnard 
 pictures. It gave me a shock to hear you 
 were on the Board of Trade. I never sus- 
 pected it. How did I escape finding out ? You 
 seemed to me a dilettante pure and simple, not 
 a bit of a business man; you knew too much 
 about the arts. I was in your city once and 
 was taken to look into the Pit. I can't place 
 you there. Do you behave as much like a rag- 
 ing maniac as the rest of them? I'd give ten 
 cents to see you there with your nice, smooth 
 hair all mussed up and your nice, smooth, cor- 
 rect person and bearing as mussy as your hair. 
 
 Good-by. G. G.
 
 Letters from G. G. 13 
 
 FROM G. G. AT HOME IN A NEW ENGLAND 
 VILLAGE, TO R. F. AT HOME. 
 
 Summer. 
 
 I know you'll think it perverse of me to be 
 glad to be here, in a scrubby New England 
 village, with my own flesh and blood and bull- 
 dog, after visiting in an enchanted villa in 
 Italy with "the Quality"; there is a decided 
 flavor of court about Montoro, a beautiful 
 high decorum, a serene order and stateliness. 
 Everything, every detail of the life and its 
 setting is ravishingly beautiful, and I feel 
 while there as if I were treading among the 
 stars, up in the Milky Way, and I dote on it ; 
 but . . . what would you? I'm clay, and 
 here in this little old gray-shingled house with 
 the green door I find life, if not so wonderful, 
 yet very sweet to live. It's like getting back 
 to one's worn old bed slippers after floating 
 about in Mercury's winged sandals. 
 
 We had a nice journey home. We came on 
 the Trojan Prince from Leghorn. Stopped 
 a couple of days in Genoa. There was a
 
 14 Letters from G. G. 
 
 church show going on there. The harbor was 
 being blessed. There were barges filled with 
 high church dignitaries in superb togs filing 
 around among the warships and merchant 
 craft. The barges were decked out like things 
 in pictures or on the stage, with velvet awn- 
 ings and gold fringes and embroidery and 
 flowery festoons, and there were draperies and 
 scarfs in melting colors, trailing deliciously 
 over the sides in the water. 
 
 That always seems the last touch in glorious 
 extravagance and delights one of me, while it 
 distresses the other. 
 
 Then the boat took us to Girgenti in the 
 south of Sicily to pick up a cargo of sulphur. 
 We had two days there, though it seems a 
 dream, it was so incredibly lovely. I believe 
 I've seen temples now to rival yours in Paes- 
 tum. Temples made of gold-colored crum- 
 bling stone, seen against a sea of chrysoprase, 
 with an amethyst sky above, turning to tur- 
 quoise overhead. And Girgenti itself? I'm 
 convinced I've seen Greece and Spain and the
 
 Letters from G. G. 15 
 
 Orient now. I'm sure that town on its high 
 crag is a composite of the three. 
 
 Then to Naples, and we had a day at Pom- 
 peii. We had a beautiful young guide to 
 show us about the place, and I must tell you 
 about that guide it's too good to keep. He 
 was young and beautiful as beautiful . . . 
 well, as beautiful as a young Neapolitan guide. 
 How do they manage it, the men there ? They 
 look like lovely animals, or ripe fruit, and as 
 unconscious. The women, on the other hand, 
 are deadly. All you are aware of as you look 
 at them is a desire to catch them and scrub 
 them, shampoo their hair, and clap them into 
 some proper stays, and tell them to sit up. I'm 
 speaking of the bourgeoises, not the peasants. 
 
 But about our guide. He looked like a 
 young emperor, as grave and lofty and sweetly 
 dignified. When we had quite done the 
 rounds of the sights he stopped, and leveling 
 his impersonal gaze upon us: "And now, 
 ladies, remains but to ask whether you prefer 
 to depart with sweet memory of our beautiful
 
 1 6 Letters from G. G. 
 
 Pompeii or whether you would wish to be 
 shown some obscene paintings ?" 
 
 If you knew Kitty you'd know how funny 
 this is. She has the dearest, clear gray eyes 
 in the world. She returned his sober gaze 
 and answered without a quiver that he was 
 very kind, but we preferred to see nothing 
 further. 
 
 Then we lagged behind, and when we were 
 hidden from view behind the angle of a build- 
 ing we fell upon each other's necks in a long, 
 limp giggle. That question, to us, the un- 
 mistakable, the just-as-far-as-you-can-see- 
 them New England spinsters! 
 
 After Naples we stopped nowhere until we 
 landed in New York, and it took eighteen 
 days. So the whole trip was a good month in 
 perfect weather. 
 
 I had bought an old copy of Dante in three 
 volumes for a franc in Genoa, and that was 
 my 'board-ship reading, that and Mr. Dooley. 
 Percy Atherton gave him to me before I left 
 Paris, and I shall always bless him for the in-
 
 Letters from G. G. 17 
 
 troduction. And then I learned by heart a 
 score or more of the sonnets of the House of 
 Life. I shall forget them in the main, I sup- 
 pose, but never quite. 
 
 There were only eleven cabin passengers 
 aboard, but hundreds of steerage, who kept us 
 from being dull. They were a continuous 
 show. All we needed do was to lean over the 
 rail of our high deck and look down upon 
 comedy and drama, with occasional sugges- 
 tions of tragedy. There was a girl, and we 
 found out her name, ominously enough, was 
 Carmela, and I miss my guess if she does not 
 end her career with a stiletto in her back. 
 
 I'm afraid yes, I'm very much afraid I 
 sympathize with what you confess is your 
 ideal of bliss to do nothing and have no de- 
 sire to do anything. No wonder, if that's 
 your frame of mind, you don't love your trade 
 of buying and selling. I don't love my paint- 
 ing trade either, I'll confess to you. Not be- 
 cause I don't love art; I do, and that's why I 
 don't enjoy the things I perpetrate. You who
 
 1 8 Letters from G. G. 
 
 have never seen any of them have no idea how 
 bad they are. When I have painted a mem- 
 ber of any household I frequent, I feel the 
 house closed to me forever I can't bear to 
 be faced by my objectionable creations. 
 Funny, too ! for in the art school I was rather 
 a prize pupil, snatched scholarships, and 
 was especially petted and made of. But when 
 I came to do it for money, that queered it all, 
 and I've never worked freely since. 
 
 How often poor Manon Lescaut's cry has 
 rung in my heart: "Oh! qu'il serait amusant, 
 de s'amuser toute la vie!" Or even if there 
 were no question of amusing oneself, just to 
 do nothing nothing f'rever, 'n ever, 'n ever. 
 Just to lie in the sun, the blessed, democratic 
 sun. Why, Romney Flagg, if I had an in- 
 come the size of the point of a needle, sup- 
 pose I'd ever do a stroke of painting or work 
 of any sort again in this life ? Catch me ! 
 
 But now let me warn you right here: this 
 is Gladys Gay, the Bohemian talking to you. 
 Next week, or to-morrow, or three minutes
 
 Letters from G. G. 19 
 
 hence, Gladys Gay, the Puritan may address 
 you, saying: Work, work, work, for it is the 
 only blessing, the only thing that is worth 
 while, the only thing that earns you standing- 
 room, the only real service, and hence the only 
 road to peace and happiness. 
 
 Good-by. G. G. 
 
 G. G. AT HOME, R. F. AT HOME. 
 
 Autumn. 
 
 You like the sound of my house? Yes, I 
 believe you would if you saw it, too; people 
 do. And there is something very endearing 
 about the Cape. Of course, it is sometimes 
 called nothing but a sand heap sparsely cov- 
 ered with scrub oak and pine, and there is 
 some truth in that, I'm bound to admit. It is 
 sandy and ragged and mosquitoey, but the 
 stunted trees leave one all the clearer, freer, 
 bigger hemisphere of sky, and such a splendid 
 big wind sweeps across it constantly. The air 
 is so clean, it is like being out at sea all the 
 time.
 
 2O Letters from G. G. 
 
 And then the long, low line of the marshes. 
 There is a homeliness, a humility in the land- 
 scape that makes it most lovable, and the tiny 
 cottages seem the human expression of the 
 landscape, the little oxydized-silver houses, 
 snuggled down low, hugging the ground, like 
 the gray rocks in the pastures. 
 
 You want to hear more ? Why, there is not 
 much more to tell, except that it is a great, 
 good thing to have a house of one's own. 
 When Alice Hayes heard that we thought of 
 buying one, when we were leaving our old 
 home, she urged so feelingly : "Oh, do take it ! 
 Do! Have a place of your own, be indepen- 
 dent of visits! People are always so shy of 
 inviting folks who have no home to go to 
 after. They always have the question in the 
 back of their minds: 'I wonder has she any 
 plans after her two weeks here are over? I 
 wonder where she'll go when she leaves 
 here?'" 
 
 Them as has, gits ! Rather cynical view of 
 the hospitable, but Miss Hayes assured me a
 
 Letters from G. G. 21 
 
 true one alas, to justify which, people will 
 quote instances of homeless guests invited for 
 ten days remaining fourteen years! 
 
 I must be sending you a picture of the 
 house, and I want you to take special note of 
 the front porch, for that is the Porch that 
 Oliver Built. 
 
 The first year we were here Oliver spent 
 several weeks at an inn hard by. He spent 
 his days with us, and made himself useful, 
 helping settle, unpack books and china, and 
 washing the "images," as Arlie called the 
 bric-a-brac. A friend came to spend a few 
 days with him about Labor Day. The two 
 hired a canoe, and were enthusiastic over pad- 
 dling about the river. I was awakened Labor 
 Day morning by a mighty sound of thumping, 
 sawing and discussion in the yard. When I 
 came down I looked out of the back door, and 
 saw Oliver and Geoffrey bustling about. I 
 asked whatever was up? Oliver said that as 
 they had no paddle for the canoe it seemed 
 rather necessary to make one.
 
 22 Letters from G. G. 
 
 "Is that all? I thought from the catouse 
 you were making you were building on an ex- 
 tension to the house, or at least a front porch." 
 
 At that, what Thomas Hardy calls a "deedy 
 look" came into Oliver's eye, and no more 
 labor was wasted on the paddle it was 
 dropped and forgotten along with the canoe. 
 He trotted off and collected cedar rails all 
 over town, and by night there was a fair start 
 toward a rustic porch. Geoffrey went away 
 next day, but Oliver worked on alone for two 
 mortal weeks; it was all you could do to get 
 him in to meals. 
 
 And, you know, only a true artist could 
 ever have made anything so pretty, so right in 
 every line and proportion, so strong, so grace- 
 ful, so complete. It gives the house such in- 
 dividuality and distinction. The little seats 
 at the sides are just the right height and 
 depth, the roof has just the right angle. It is 
 a dear porch, and it is all smothered in trum- 
 pet vine now. 
 
 Some one, seeing it when it was first fin-
 
 Letters from G. G. 23 
 
 ished, turned in astonishment to Oliver: 
 "Whoever would have thought you were such 
 a carpenter?" "Why, didn't you know," said 
 Oliver, "I did all the rustic work on the Wal- 
 dorf-Astoria ?" 
 
 No, there is little further to tell you about 
 the house except that it seems the place where 
 every one in town has lived at some time. 
 Half the population of the village appear to 
 have been born in the southwest chamber, or 
 their grandmothers died there, or their Aunt 
 Jemimas set up housekeeping here when they 
 were married. It seems to have had a varied 
 career. I wonder what the ghosts of past in- 
 mates think of it now, with its concert grand 
 piano, and Venetian mirrors, and Florentine 
 tapestries, and Bokhara rugs, and all Mother's 
 dear belongings? 
 
 People ask us if we are not afraid of leav- 
 ing the house alone over winters. Afraid? 
 Why, the natives wouldn't steal. There 
 are no tramps ; this is a respectable com- 
 munity, and if there were tramps they'd
 
 24 Letters from G. G. 
 
 heaps rather have nice fresh-colored chromos 
 than any of our dim paintings. What would 
 they do with photographs of Botticelli Ma- 
 donnas and saints? As for the books, much 
 use they'd have for them ! Then the rugs no 
 one would give them house room. Faded, 
 rather threadbare, rather ragged I dare say 
 they'd wonder we litter the place up with them. 
 And Ginori porcelain, I'll engage, is not suf- 
 ficiently durable-looking to tempt them. 
 
 I could tell you a lot about the natives, but 
 it's bedtime, and they'll keep, as they are the 
 salt of the earth. G. G. 
 
 G. G. AT HOME, TO R. F. AT HOME. 
 
 Autumn. 
 
 You can no more place me in a little gray 
 cottage on the New England coast than I can 
 you in the Wheat Pit? Believe me, I very 
 much belong here ; I belong here as much as 
 in the Louvre, or the Italian garden o' dreams, 
 or little old Broadway.
 
 Letters from G. G. 25 
 
 You want to hear more about our place and 
 our ways of life? 
 
 It's a tiny house, plenty of room in it for 
 four guests, but none for a servant. Kitty 
 and I are the servants, and you've no idea how 
 deliciously clear and fresh the atmosphere of 
 a servantless house is ! The house is so small 
 we couldn't have a domestic forever around 
 under our feet. Besides, no servant would put 
 up with a kitchen no bigger than a postage 
 stamp, and no modern conveniences, no set 
 tubs, not even a pump, nothing but a well. 
 You couldn't expect a servant to see the 
 beauty of the motion of pulling up a bucket 
 from the well as compared with that of work- 
 ing a pump handle, now could you? 
 
 The kitchen is the pride and joy of our 
 hearts. Talk about convenience! You can 
 stand in the middle of it and open the win- 
 dow, shut the door, poke the fire, and stir the 
 pudding. It is as compact as a ship's galley. 
 In contrast to that, we have a shelf filled 
 with cookery-books in all languages great
 
 26 Letters from G. G. 
 
 tomes in red morocco: "La Cuisine Clas- 
 sique," "La Regina delle Cuoche," a big Ger- 
 man volume full of illustrations of imperial 
 puddings and ice-cream castles, also that 
 greediest of works, George Augustus Sala's 
 "Thorough Good Cook"; such good things in 
 that! He describes dishes con amore, he 
 makes your mouth water, only his recipes are 
 rather impossible; they all begin with a pint 
 of cream, and that, you know . . . when 
 you have no cow . . . 
 
 Well, there's just one thing in life I pride 
 myself upon, and only one, and that is my 
 cooking. I'm a cook-book cook, I grant you, 
 but that wouldn't trouble you a bit while you 
 were eating my spaghetti, and my pies, and 
 my gingerbread, and my chocolate cake, and 
 my sou pe a I'oignon, and my corn fritters. 
 And Kitty cooks even better than I. We have 
 our specialties, and neither encroaches upon 
 the other's grounds. 
 
 We usually come down in May, and have a 
 week's hard house-cleaning, but when that is
 
 Letters from G. G. 27 
 
 over we sit back and breathe the fragrance of 
 cleanliness, and rejoice our sight in shining 
 brass and glass and china, and polished fur- 
 niture, clean, mellow-colored rugs, and fresh 
 curtains. 
 
 Then begins our happy summer career as 
 hostesses. There is a peculiar pleasure and 
 satisfaction in attending to the creature com- 
 forts of people one likes. It is a joy of a very 
 special stamp to bake and brew things to 
 make one's ascetic friends overeat disgrace- 
 fully. It is pleasant to wait upon them, to 
 prepare their bath, make their bed, wash their 
 dishes. 
 
 We love to have people come. We love to 
 have them stay, and stay as long as they will, 
 and then, I don't mind whispering to you, we 
 love to have them go, and come again some 
 other time. We have people with us all sum- 
 mer long, and it is sweet ! But the sweetest 
 time of all is in October, when for our last 
 six weeks here Kitty and I are quite by our-
 
 28 Letters from G. G. 
 
 selves. That is when we are Darby and Joan 
 indeed. 
 
 Oh, the days of Santa Pace that dawn for 
 us then ! Long mornings of work, Kitty 
 shut up in the library, I shut up here in my 
 den; long afternoons of walking in the au- 
 tumn woods ; then long delicious rest when 
 we come home dog-tired, that good tired that 
 comes of beautiful long miles, rest by the 
 blazing wood fire on the hearth in the dusk. 
 We lie on the couch in front of it and dream 
 long waking dreams. And then the long even- 
 ings ! A lamp is lighted and placed on a table 
 before the fire, and Kitty-Darby sits on one 
 side reading aloud, and I- Joan sit on the 
 other side rocking and knitting, and the fire 
 purrs, and Mick over on the couch snores in 
 content. And the wind outside sighs, and 
 the lilac bush and the peach tree tap at the win- 
 dow and intensify the feel of protected 
 warmth in the little book-lined library. 
 
 And when bedtime comes we build up a 
 high blaze and go to sleep in the next room
 
 Letters from G. G. 29 
 
 with the pinky light dancing on walls and 
 celling. Such good long nights o' sleep! 
 Talk about peace! 
 
 The happy days draw all too soon to a close 
 and then trunks are fetched down from the 
 attic and all is prepared for winter. The smil- 
 ing little house looks strange and unfriendly 
 dismantled and shrouded in brown holland 
 and sheets, with a pervasive penetrating odor 
 of naphtha mothballs. It gives a twinge to 
 turn the key in the lock of the green door, 
 with its nice old brass knocker, and to turn 
 one's back upon the trumpet vine but ahead 
 lies New York! New York full of friends 
 and picture shows and music and hot tubs! 
 New York, the very smell of whose dirty 
 streets and noise of whose insane traffic are 
 thrilling. 
 
 It is a sad moment when one pulls out of 
 the little station; but oh! it's fine to land at 
 Forty-second Street! 
 
 Good-night. It is late. My candles are 
 flaring and fainting. G. G.
 
 30 Letters from G. G. 
 
 G. G., BROADWAY, NEW YORK, TO R. F. AT 
 HOME. 
 
 Winter. 
 
 You don't seem to entirely realize that I 
 very much belong to the working-class, and 
 earn what bread I eat ; and just now, after my 
 long vacation, it is a matter of no work no 
 bread, and I can't be fluttering off to Chicago 
 on pleasure bent at the very outset of the sea- 
 son, especially as I am lucky enough to be up 
 to the ears in painting. Yes, the miniature 
 trade flourishes, and all I pray for is eyes to 
 keep it up with. Eyes are a grave question 
 when one does miniatures. If I sang, my 
 throat would doubtless constantly threaten 
 giving out ; if I wrote, I dare say I should be 
 running out of brains ; if I were on the stage, 
 I should have panics about my face and figure. 
 Well, when my eyes give out, I can always 
 hire out as cook. 
 
 I am working awfully hard, and playing 
 hard as well. One can't help overdoing both 
 in this crazy town. I work all day, and then
 
 Letters from G. G. 31 
 
 at night I hang an evening frock on my bones 
 and devote myself to diversions. A quiet 
 evening at home with a book, by the lamp, is 
 the exception and the luxury; and you know, 
 in its way, I love this as much as the life at 
 home, in that dear crumb of a village where 
 one can rise every morning in the soothing 
 certainty that nothing will happen unless it 
 is that the iceman fails to appear, and that is 
 exciting, if you like. 
 
 I like the extremes the dead of the country 
 and the heart of the city. No commuter's life 
 in mine, thank you. 
 
 It has its depressing aspect, the heart of the 
 city, I don't deny. When I come back to it, 
 sometimes, after long months of the sweetness 
 of the country, I feel a frantic desire to rush 
 away, away, away anywhere out of the 
 world out to sea in an open boat out of 
 sight of land; to the mountain-tops; to the 
 deep, silent forest places ; away from the sight 
 of ill-used dogs and horses and children ; from 
 the sight of the crowds in the streets of peo-
 
 32 Letters from G. G. 
 
 pie, nine out of every ten of whom look as if 
 they ought still to be going about on all fours ; 
 away from the sight of this parody of life, the 
 bitter gaiety, the light-hearted corruption of 
 this thoroughfare of hell, this plague-spot on 
 the face of the earth. 
 
 But it all wears off in an incredibly brief 
 time, and when the time comes I am loath to 
 leave the never-ending kaleidoscopic show, so 
 freighted with human interest. The people, 
 all sorts and conditions of men, that is what is 
 so unflaggingly entertaining, for I like people, 
 you know. I gather from an occasional word 
 you have let drop here and there that you are 
 not overfond of la bete humaine. I have to 
 own to a very vulgar love of human beings of 
 all kinds. I like them, and I'd engage to get 
 on equally well with the Czar of Russia, Jack 
 the Ripper, Kid McCoy or Beau Brummel. 
 Of course, you are right ; it is seldom that one 
 can sight up very high at one's neighbor and 
 not overshoot the mark, but all people have 
 their points, if one has the beauty-seeing eye
 
 Letters from G. G. 33 
 
 to detect them. They may not strike a very 
 uniformly high level, like our skyscrapers, but, 
 like most churches, they may have a spire 
 or two. 
 
 Good-by, and let me repeat how nice I think 
 it of you all to have wanted to see me again. 
 Are you quite sure you did? You know I'm 
 not entirely sure that I want to see you again. 
 Now, please, please, no misunderstanding! 
 For that I must trust you. The idea is, that 
 from things you say I think you have perhaps 
 a rosier memory of me than I could quite live 
 up to, and that it would be at the risk of dis- 
 illusioning you that I should permit myself 
 to be seen again. 
 
 G. G., BROADWAY, NEW YORK, TO R. F. AT 
 HOME. 
 
 Winter. 
 
 What is one to do about coming of Puritan 
 ancestors? There ought to be a remedy. 
 Won't you or some one invent a quick, 
 sure, safe cure?
 
 34 Letters from G. G. 
 
 I was coming home from downtown in a 
 Sixth Avenue car the other night, between six 
 and seven o'clock. Two men got in at Four- 
 teenth Street and sat in the corner opposite 
 me. One was a spare, red-headed, pale young 
 man, talking eagerly and hurriedly to the 
 other, a huge creature who looked like an el- 
 derly toad, shabby and dejected enough, and 
 most unappetizing. He looked a good, hon- 
 est sort, though. 
 
 The young man was evidently trying with 
 all his might to cheer the elder. It seemed 
 characteristic of New York that his efforts at 
 bracing up his friend had to take place in a 
 crowded car during the hurried run between 
 Fourteenth and Thirty-fourth Streets. He 
 was trying hard to give the greatest possible 
 help in the shortest possible time, and the 
 words tumbled out sharp and quick and em- 
 phatic : 
 
 "Now, you just want to brace up! You 
 mustn't give up, d'ye hear? Yes, I know; 
 that was a good job you lost, and you'd had
 
 Letters from G. G. 35 
 
 it for years, but what of it? There's other 
 good jobs ! And you've got a good name and 
 a clean record behind you, and lots of friends, 
 all right. And your friends ain't goin' back 
 on you. They're goin' to stand by you. Yes, 
 of course, you ain't as young as you was, but 
 then neither is your children as young as they 
 was ; and they're goin' to be able to help. 
 And then there's your wife. Your wife is a 
 fine woman. She'll stick to you job or no 
 job. And there's my wife. Why, my wife 
 jest thinks the world of you. She was sayin' 
 only the other night how much she thought 
 o' you. Now, you jest want to stand up and 
 face the band, and rely on your friends. They 
 ain't goin' to see you go to the wall. / ain't, 
 for one. You won't forget that, will you?" 
 
 The old man seemed greatly moved. He 
 murmured his thanks in broken scraps: 
 
 "You're awful kind . . . Your wife is 
 real good ! . . . Thank her for me ... 
 I'm very sensitive, and I appreciate it when 
 folks have a friendly feelin', and speak a kind
 
 36 Letters from G. G. 
 
 word to me. . . . Thank you . . . 
 Thank you all ... !" 
 
 At Thirty-fourth Street the young- man 
 briskly shook hands, thumped his friend ear- 
 nestly on the back, and dashed for the door, 
 to transfer to a crosstown car. 
 
 The old man sat in his corner. A newsboy 
 passed. He stopped him and bought a paper 
 not to read. He opened it and held it be- 
 fore his face to screen himself from sight, but 
 I saw the tears stream down his cheeks, and 
 I saw the disconsolate sag of his trembling 
 mouth and chin. 
 
 I had to leave the car at Fortieth Street, so 
 I had not much time to think what to do. I 
 wanted so to speak to him, to say: "Don't 
 grieve; please don't! Honestly, it will all 
 come right." 
 
 But oh, the self-consciousness of New 
 Englanders ! Their fear of their impulses ! 
 Their dread of being thought forthputting ! 
 What would the man think of a strange wo-
 
 Letters from G. G. 37 
 
 man stepping up and speaking to him no 
 matter why? 
 
 And so I walked out of the car without a 
 word or a look at him. 
 
 I wonder did it turn out all right? I have 
 thought of him ever since, always with re- 
 gretful, prayerful well-wishing. 
 
 What would you have done, you, who are 
 not from Boston, Massachusetts? 
 
 G. G., BROADWAY, NEW YORK, TO R. F. AT 
 HOME. 
 
 Spring. 
 
 You will find inclosed a memory-jogging 
 picture of your old friend of Paris days. 
 You say that you catch yourself trying vainly 
 to recall what I look like. That I seem to you 
 now a myth, a shadow. Well, this is how I 
 should wish you to remember me. It is a 
 half-tone reproduction which appeared in a 
 magazine of a portrait of G. G., done by prob- 
 ably the best miniature painter in America. 
 I know you'll say to yourself as you look at
 
 38 Letters from G. G. 
 
 it: "Jove! she's good-looking! I didn't re- 
 member her as good-looking as that!" 
 
 Now, that's all right. You don't remem- 
 ber me like that because, my friend, I am not 
 like that not when I first get up in the morn- 
 ing and hook together a serviceable shirtwaist 
 and skirt, and go down to breakfast. But, 
 bless you ! it is not the office of the miniature 
 painter to depict one at one's flattest and most 
 unprofitable. A miniature painter should 
 make it his charming task to immortalize a 
 woman at her "one dead, deathless hour," as 
 she is in the eyes of her lover, at the most 
 ecstatic moment of his rosiest dream of her! 
 
 Now there I am ! That miniature is what 
 / call a success. 
 
 When Laura was painting it she asked me 
 if I didn't think, honestly now, that she was 
 being mighty kind to my collar bones? She 
 was, indeed, as you see, and to my nose also. 
 That willing nose, as Laura so sweetly termed 
 it, which is such a contradiction to the chin.
 
 Letters from G. G. 39 
 
 The nose is whispering, "You may" when 
 the chin announces, "You sha'n't!" 
 
 As for you, you are as present to me to-day 
 as you were a year ago February. I think 
 I could make a pencil sketch of your Graeco- 
 American profile, but that, let me hasten to 
 add, is because I have the eye whose business 
 it is to take account of lines and shapes, so 
 you needn't feel flattered. 
 
 Do you realize that we are coming to be 
 very old friends? Have you not often had 
 occasion to sigh : "Where are the friends of 
 yester-year ?" 
 
 G. G., BROADWAY, NEW YORK, TO R. F. AT 
 HOME. 
 
 Spring. 
 
 Not satisfied with that nice pretty picture? 
 You want one that does not look "so far from 
 earth"? Well, then, here is one as near to 
 the earth as you could wish. I'm sending 
 it to you not really to fill your long-felt need, 
 but to show you, for one thing, how very
 
 40 Letters from G. G. 
 
 dear Mick is. Don't you love him, sitting up 
 there on the bench so still, with paws in G. 
 G.'s lap? 
 
 And for another but stay! 
 
 No use when spring "paints azure all 
 above and emerald all underfoot," I am like 
 that lilac bush in Bryant Park ; not being a 
 poet I can't burst into rapturous song. The 
 best I can do is to blossom into glad raiment. 
 
 Nothing, for the time being, is so well 
 worth study, not brown but light-hearted, 
 iridescent study as clothes! 
 
 For a spell there I have not a soul above a 
 silk petticoat, until at Easter I climb to one in 
 the form you see reproduced. 
 
 I say, Romney Flagg, dear boy, will you be 
 pleased just to look at me 'at? My hat, did I 
 say? 
 
 MY HAT!!! 
 
 Doesn't it deserve to be writ in letters capi- 
 tal ? Not on brass or stone or earth or what-
 
 Letters from G. G. 41 
 
 ever but in the hushed and reverent heart 
 of man! 
 
 It should really be spoke in verse, not in 
 my colloquial patois, for few things so deserve 
 immortality as this same sweet thing in hats. 
 We have spoken of the moral element of true 
 beauty. The moral support afforded me by 
 that thing resting like a blessing on my head ! 
 It feels like a halo descended from heaven 
 upon me. It is the glory that was Paris and 
 the grandeur that was Rue de la Paix ! 
 
 My mental and spiritual make-up ought to 
 undergo repairs to match it. It looks as if 
 physically I'd do, for I defy you to say it is 
 not becoming; but otherwise oh, yes, I 
 know I'm miserably unworthy of it, for find 
 me in art or nature anything more consum- 
 mate than the curves of that brim ; more flow- 
 er-like than the droop of the plumes; more 
 mysterious than the windings of the velvet 
 under the edge; more tenderly dazzling than 
 the wreath; more luscious than the deep gold 
 of the straw!
 
 42 Letters from G. G. 
 
 G. G. AT HOME ON THE CAPE, TO R. F. HOME 
 
 AGAIN FROM EUROPE. 
 
 Autumn. 
 
 Glory be! You've written at last! 
 
 I was on the point of sending you a copy 
 of a poem by Emily Dickinson. One verse, 
 the first, runs: 
 
 "I had a guinea golden; 
 
 I lost it in the sand, 
 And though the sum was simple, 
 
 And pounds were in the lapd, 
 Still had it such a value 
 
 Unto my frugal eye, 
 That when I could not find it 
 
 I sat me down to sigh." 
 
 I had no relish, no mind at all, to lose my 
 sterling friend, and I was so happy to see your 
 funny, familiar fist in its customary green ink, 
 that I forgive you the very lame reasons you 
 give for your interminable silence. 
 
 All the elaborate reasons you give for open- 
 ing your letter with a frank "Dear Gladys" 
 are equally flimsy. The only one that counts 
 is the very first: that you want to, and don't
 
 Letters from G. G. 43 
 
 think I'll mind. Gracious, no! Call me any- 
 thing you like. I don't like Gladys myself. It 
 is only one degree less stupid a name than 
 Grace or Mabel or Ethel, etc., and nobody 
 but picture-show catalogues calls me Gladys, 
 anyway. It's always my two initials, G. G. 
 or just G. that I'm called, with such vulgar 
 variants as Gyp, Gippo, or Gipporino. 
 
 I don't so very much care for your name, 
 Romney, you know, so I shall call you Guinea 
 Golden. Isn't that a pleasant name ? I'll call 
 you that as long as you write me long, pleas- 
 ant letters; when you don't, you will be 
 Guinea Pig! 
 
 G. G. AT HOME TO R. F. AT HOME. 
 
 'Autumn. 
 
 Don't you think grown-ups as a rule rather 
 dislike picnics ? They leave the liking of them 
 to children. For their part they had rather 
 stay at home and eat in the dining-room at a 
 solid table, in a comfortable chair, without 
 spiders and dead leaves in their victuals.
 
 44 Letters from G. G. 
 
 But I do love a picnic! Just the packing 
 of a basket with eatables, and going some- 
 where, anywhere, so long as it is away, to eat 
 in the open, makes a holiday and a treat. 
 
 I can remember many a picnic of the kind 
 the picture of which naturally rises in one's 
 mind at the name. The sort to which many 
 people and all their children are asked, that 
 take place in some nice, clean grove to which 
 one drives in "barges." The sort that are all 
 fun and feed for the young, all work and 
 weariness for the elders, whose only pleasure 
 in the thing is in seeing the children enjoy 
 themselves. 
 
 From eleven on through my teens the years 
 were punctuated with birthday picnics of that 
 description, for which I have prayed for good 
 weather with desperate intensity for days be- 
 fore. 
 
 But the picnics that have made dear the 
 name have been very different. Much less 
 populous, for one thing. The ideal number 
 of participants is two, possibly four, or even
 
 Letters from G. G. 45 
 
 three. Of course, they must be exactly the 
 right three or four, but I've not found the 
 right people for tete-a-tete picnics so very 
 rare. 
 
 Kitty and I mark with golden letters certain 
 days in our past on which we have started off 
 in the morning, with food for the day, and 
 come home at night, having passed spotless, 
 consummate hours. 
 
 Once Mother and Daisy went to the Wor- 
 cester Music Festival, on a glorious Septem- 
 ber day. Kitty and I, left to ourselves, took 
 sandwiches and fruit, a book of old English 
 ballads and the dogs, and went to Chestnut 
 Hill Reservoir. We've never forgotten the 
 mood of that simple day. 
 
 Oliver made one in some of our most mem- 
 orable picnics. On a special one there were 
 but the three of us: Kitty (poet), I (paint- 
 er) and Oliver (painter-poet). You might 
 expect of that combination that reason and 
 soul would be the fare. At most a grape, a 
 wafer, a drop of dew? No such thing. I
 
 46 Letters from G. G. 
 
 wish you had seen the size hampers we stag- 
 gered under on our way to Duxbury. 
 
 It was early May, apple-blossom time, and 
 we knew of an orchard down there that was a 
 miracle in the spring. We took an early 
 train, and had time for a good rest before 
 food, under the most thickly blossomed, em- 
 bowering pink tree. 
 
 Such a spread! Anchovies, olives, salame, 
 cold chicken, a salad; and for sweets, those 
 marvels, pecan sticks and brandied marrons 
 glaces, all accompanied by champagne. I've 
 said ever since that no one knows champagne 
 who doesn't know it in the sunshine, under 
 apple-blossom boughs. 
 
 There was not the slightest suggestion in 
 us that day of the lean, hollow-eyed artist, 
 starving in his garret, nor did we bear out 
 the popular impression that has it that the 
 artistic temperament is coupled with a dainty 
 appetite and a delicate constitution. (It was 
 Maude Valerie White, and she's an artist, if
 
 Letters from G. G. 47 
 
 you like, who used so devoutly to say: 
 "Thank God, I'm greedy!") 
 
 We've had some picnics on the river, when, 
 after an afternoon's canoeing, we have found 
 precisely the spot, and tying the canoes to- 
 gether have had our meal by sunset glow, in 
 the lee of a wooded shore, and paddled home 
 by moonlight. Fragrant memories, those! 
 
 Nowadays, when Kitty and I are alone at 
 home on the Cape, we sometimes walk to the 
 sea, three miles from the house, with bread 
 and butter spread with meat for solid and jam 
 for sweet. We sit on the sand and rest and 
 look at the water and are very happy. 
 
 Even taking our food on a tray out under 
 the big oak in fair weather makes a miniature 
 picnic, and is an improvement on the dining- 
 room. And now that we have added a back 
 porch and can set a table out there, though 
 that is only one remove from the every-day 
 programme, it still smacks of picnic, and the 
 food is doubly grateful and blessed, because 
 eaten under the sky.
 
 48 Letters from G. G. 
 
 Is it a relic of the child or of the savage that 
 lingers in us? 
 
 G. G., BROADWAY, NEW YORK, TO R. F. AT 
 HOME. 
 
 Winter. 
 
 The yearly operatorial debauch has begun, 
 Guinea, my dear. Once I'm started, you can't 
 stop me. I go through the season on a pro- 
 longed music jag, and this year it is more 
 than usual strong upon me because I've had 
 luck, and the pennies are not as scarce as they 
 sometimes are, and there are such things to 
 be heard! 
 
 Some children are born with silver spoons 
 in their mouths, others are said to be born 
 pencil in hand. I think I must have come 
 into the world presenting a ticket which 
 should admit me to all the music I wanted to 
 hear. 
 
 I began early my mad career as opera-goer. 
 I was not three years old. I still retain a 
 vague impression of sitting up in the front of
 
 Letters from G. G. 49 
 
 a box at the Pagliano in Florence, dressed in 
 my best frock, clutching a bouquet in both 
 hands, and listening with every fibre of my 
 little body. It was "Rigoletto," my first de- 
 light. Delight it was, though all that re- 
 mains of that first performance is a memory 
 of a man in red tights, and a lady in white 
 who wept in her pocket handkerchief. 
 
 Then "Aida," over which I broke my heart, 
 for the tenor was a friend of the family and 
 a particular friend of mine, and when I saw 
 him dying in the black dungeon, I bellowed 
 right out: "Nannetti! Nannetti! Mio povero 
 Nannetti!" and had to be hurried out of the 
 box and pacified and told that it was all make- 
 believe, and that I should see my Nannetti 
 safe and sound next day if I'd be .good and 
 stop crying. 
 
 All through boarding-school years our 
 greatest treat was going to the opera, and 
 there was another case of heartbreak one day 
 when I fell down and damaged my nose, and 
 was such a sight that "Mademoiselle," our
 
 50 Letters from G. G. 
 
 "dircctrice," wouldn't let me go to hear "Nor- 
 ma" in the evening. I've never had the 
 chance since. I've never heard "Norma," 
 and I'm afraid I shall never catch up with 
 that one missed opportunity. 
 
 After we came home to America, of course 
 opera nights were fewer than in Italy, but 
 then there were the symphonies, bless 'em, 
 year in, year out. In Boston they only gave 
 us a couple of weeks' opera season, and that 
 had to last us until next year. But, oh, my 
 soul! the year the De Reszkes first came! 
 Who will ever forget those performances in 
 Mechanics' Hall! I fell in love at first hear- 
 ing with divine Jean, and I shall die and turn 
 to dust still adoring him, and thanking my 
 stars that I happened to be alive when he was, 
 and privileged to hear him in his glory. I 
 heard him so often that finally before the end 
 the impression of his voice became enduring, 
 and now I can shut my ears and summon back 
 the echo of entire passages and phrases as he 
 rendered them.
 
 Letters from G. G. 51 
 
 Ah, Jean ! the only one of his kind that ever 
 was or ever will be. The only Romeo, the 
 only Lohengrin, the only Walther, and Tris- 
 tan, and Siegfried! The only one who ever 
 made one realize to the very full every possi- 
 ble romantic beauty of a character he imper- 
 sonated and all the beauty of the music that 
 lie sang. 
 
 There were two charming boys of our ac- 
 quaintance in those old Boston days who shared 
 our enthusiasm for opera (Kitty is as music 
 mad as I). One was a budding composer, 
 the other a student of philosophy at Harvard. 
 How often we climbed the gallery stairs to- 
 gether! We usually went Dutch treat, but 
 once these youths invited us, and we went to 
 hear "Tristan and Isolde," and had good 
 seats, and we were very fine, and long after I 
 learned that it was fortunate the weather was 
 mild for a time just then, for the philosopher, 
 Colline-wise, had pawned his overcoat to pay 
 for his share of the tickets, the dear thing! 
 
 Nowadays in New York here there is liter-
 
 52 Letters from G. G. 
 
 ally no staying away from the opera. For 
 one thing it is so close at hand. How could 
 I settle down to a quiet evening's letter writ- 
 ing to Guinea Golden when I knew that the 
 "Walkiire" was going on within a few hun- 
 dred feet? I believe I've sat in every corner 
 of that good old Metropolitan Opera House 
 from the front row in the orchestra to the 
 last in the "sky parlor," and further, for I 
 heard the "Gotterdammerung" one night last 
 spring from the stairway of the fire-escape 
 outside! It was a balmy, starry night, the 
 windows and doors were all left open, and I 
 heard every syllable even of the text. The 
 music came mellowed by the distance, accom- 
 panied by the muffled hum of the streets be- 
 low. What was amusing was when the 
 "Funeral March" was being played, and the 
 brasses made those big boom-boom crashes, to 
 hear the electric-car gongs down in Broad- 
 way make response with a tinkling ping-ping. 
 Well, rather than stay away from an opera 
 or a symphony, I believe I'd sit perched
 
 Letters from G. G. 53 
 
 throughout a performance on the center chan- 
 delier if they'd let me. 
 
 Now, I ask you, when one cares that much 
 for anything, isn't one entitled to one's fill of 
 it? I know people a-plenty who raise their 
 eyebrows in disapproving wonder that near 
 beggars like us should indulge in what seems 
 to them an extravagance. But as we sit in 
 our modest places, with rapture filtering 
 through our ears to our souls, we ask our- 
 selves the question : If we have not a right to 
 be here, who has ? Leave us to get on, if need 
 be, without the necessities of life, but grant 
 us the luxury of music. 
 
 Man does not live by bread alone. 
 
 G. G., BROADWAY, TO R. F. AT HOME. 
 
 Winter. 
 
 Of course you don't know Maude Sander- 
 son, do you, Guinea? Well, if ever there was 
 a dear soul ! The sort that makes you feel 
 as if not only she, but the whole world loved 
 and appreciated you.
 
 54 Letters from G. G. 
 
 One night, awhile ago, a number of us were 
 discussing the question : If one could be some 
 one else, and could meet one's present self, 
 would one like oneself? 
 
 Some thought yes, some thought no, giving 
 more or less unconvincing reasons. 
 
 But sweet-hearted Maude exclaimed with 
 such complete conviction: "Why, I'm sure I 
 should love myself ! I should be so sure of so 
 much love in return." 
 
 And that ended the discussion, it seemed so 
 final. 
 
 For my part, I always did agree with Mrs. 
 Golightly in her admission: "I never could 
 quite hate a man for quite adoring me." Man, 
 or woman either, for the very best reason in 
 the world for liking people seems to be their 
 liking one. It is the most endearing quality. 
 Nothing, not the charm of beauty, youth, wit, 
 character, goodness or gold, compares with it. 
 
 But then it doesn't need to go as far as 
 that. Who wants to be adored by every 
 passer-by ? What I'm coming to is the charm
 
 Letters from G. G. 55 
 
 that people have and by people I mean just 
 people, strangers, folks around the streets, in 
 shops and trains and street-cars a charm 
 that it would seem easy to cultivate or develop 
 that of seeing one. Do you know what I 
 mean? That of giving one a sense that one 
 exists for them, of not being so completely 
 imprisoned in themselves, within the walls of 
 their own thoughts and interests that no stran- 
 ger need apply for admittance to their con- 
 sciousness. 
 
 Don't you know the feeling of warm grati- 
 tude that gushes up in your heart if a shop- 
 girl really sees and hears you, if she gives 
 you the feeling that you are something more 
 than a part of her weary mechanical drud- 
 gery? 
 
 I once happened to be in a big department 
 store to which I seldom went because it is so 
 far from home. I bought some stationery. 
 The girl in charge of the counter was so ami- 
 able, she radiated such general good will, and 
 treated me so like a human being that natu-
 
 56 Letters from G. G. 
 
 rally I've gone to her for my writing-paper 
 ever since. And though I have to go far, I'd 
 go farther just to pay homage to that lovable 
 quality the consciousness of the other per- 
 son. She makes of her business of selling 
 paper a personal relation. 
 
 I dare say in the same way shop-girls re- 
 member customers who are aware of them as 
 individuals and not money in the slot ma- 
 chines across the counter. 
 
 I saw a case once in Sixth Avenue of an 
 old shoe-lace peddler holding out his fistful 
 of dangling shoe-laces to the passing stream 
 of shopping women. He might have been thin 
 air, or the people blind; no one saw him. If 
 they did, it was mostly with a look that swept 
 him from the sidewalk into the gutter and off 
 the face of the earth. 
 
 And then a girl walked by, unhurriedly, and 
 saw the outstretched hand full of strings, and 
 from the hand she glanced to the face. And 
 she had eyes in her head that saw what they 
 were looking at, and carried the message to a
 
 Letters from G. G. 57 
 
 brain that understood and to a heart that felt, 
 and her whole person spoke so plainly : 
 
 "You have a gentle, patient old face, and 
 you are old. Your shoe-laces are probably 
 pretty bad, but I'd buy some only I can't just 
 now, though I can't stop to tell you why. But 
 I'm sorry, and another day I'll buy if I can." 
 
 Believe it or not, she said it all, and the old 
 man felt it, and I'm sure he had a comfort- 
 able sense of being made of flesh and bones, 
 and not of mist, as she went by with the 
 crowd. A pleasant sense which was the fore- 
 runner of and maybe quite equal to the satis- 
 faction of selling the dozen laces I stepped up 
 and bought of him, all on account of the girl's 
 genial, comprehending, responsive eyes, which 
 appeared to be open to every appeal made to 
 them. 
 
 In these days, when such a howl is going 
 up over the rise in the cost of living, over the 
 Baked Apple ice. sign, which seems to spell
 
 58 Letters from G. G. 
 
 poverty for so many, I'll confide to you that 
 I think people miss a lot in not being poor. 
 
 I don't mean the sort of poverty that knows 
 how poor it is, and how poor it is going to re- 
 main, but the uncertain poverty, the adven- 
 turous, the Bohemian poverty, that hasn't a 
 penny to-day, but may have some to-morrow. 
 
 I don't know, it may be a case of sour 
 grapes, but I think I'm honest when I say that 
 for nothing in the world would I be anything 
 but a poor Bohemian. 
 
 Would I, I wonder, even if I had the 
 chance, settle into an orderly member of so- 
 ciety with a salary or an income? Or would 
 I refuse to surrender the vivid joys of the un- 
 expected that come of belonging to the army 
 of those who live on nothi/ig in particular a 
 year? 
 
 I'm glad the chance is not likely to be of- 
 fered me. It would be disappointing to find 
 that I'd consent to fall into the groove in 
 which a real bed, and three meals a day, and
 
 Letters from G. G. 59 
 
 the amount of clothes prescribed by the law 
 were assured me until I died. 
 
 No need to tell me that it is a comfort to 
 know whence your next five dollars are com- 
 ing. Don't I know it? And yet . . . 
 when you don't know, how like a meteor it 
 flashes into view. And, you know, it always 
 does come, somehow or other. I have a fairly 
 good number of years' experience to back me 
 when I say that. 
 
 The secret of it is, I suppose, that if you do 
 what is up to you, some one call it God if 
 you like, call it Providence, or call it your 
 neighbor will do the rest, and you can't fall 
 down. It is a comfortable working code, once 
 you get it into your system. 
 
 Picture the Padre Eterno, like the benign 
 old white-bearded gentleman in a nice blue 
 dress the old masters loved to paint Him, pat- 
 ting you on the head, and saying: "My good 
 little child, all that is required of you is to 
 try to do something like your little best. Leave
 
 60 Letters from G. G. 
 
 the rest to me. Look at me. Don't I look as 
 if I were to be trusted?" 
 
 Does any one but a Bohemian know the real 
 pleasure of paying a bill? Mostly people 
 know where the money lies waiting which will 
 pay the dentist. You can't escape dentists' 
 bills. You shouldn't. But you wonder how 
 this necessity for a fresh white smile is to be 
 paid for, and you a modest painter girl. And 
 then ... a friend from the West comes 
 to lunch, and sees some pot-boiling candle 
 shades you have made, and she likes them, 
 and orders lots, and you are thrilled through 
 and through, for that means that the dentist's 
 bill is receipted. 
 
 Or you come back to town in the fall after 
 a heaven-sent summer's rest. Your golden 
 days of loafing are over, and black winter 
 stares you in the eyes. Of course there is 
 nothing to worry about, but there is the 
 spasm of glee that catches your throat when 
 a beautiful blonde young woman drops out of
 
 Letters from G. G. 61 
 
 the rainy heavens one day while you are darn- 
 ing your stockings, and orders two miniatures 
 of her dear dead mother, one for herself and 
 one for her brother. 
 
 The money for those is going to carry you 
 half through the season. 
 
 Then again, you come home from Europe, 
 and land in Hoboken with exactly four dol- 
 lars in the world, and you go to your "uncle's" 
 and "hang up" your belongings. 
 
 If you are a Bohemian you know that road 
 to your uncle's, and your friends know the 
 state of your strong box by the presence or 
 absence about the premises of your valuables, 
 if you have any. Your jewelry might be diag- 
 nosed as intermittent. 
 
 Well, then, you come home from Europe 
 with four dollars, and borrow what you can 
 of your uncle, and you go to a big hotel in the 
 mountains, and there you get half a dozen 
 portraits to do, and there you are, set up for 
 the next long time. Those portraits wouldn't
 
 62 Letters from G. G. 
 
 be half the joy to do if they didn't mean fetch- 
 ing back your rings. 
 
 But, you say, suppose you didn't get the 
 portraits to do? What is the use of suppos- 
 ing? You do get them. 
 
 And then the fun it is, the plain, unmixed 
 fun, to have awfully little to do with but do it 
 awfully well. Anybody can look well and do 
 things with money, but it takes an artist to do 
 it on pretty nearly nothing. 
 
 The fun it is, just as you feel your clothes 
 are getting to look a bit haggard, to have that 
 blessed Eva Hawkes give you her million-dol- 
 lar old-rose broadcloth dress ! 
 
 And the fun it is, when you are feeling a bit 
 down and blue, to have some one telephone 
 and ask will you go to the opera and sit in the 
 gallery. WILL you! And you sit in your 
 gallery seat, and know you are having a better 
 time than any one in the house. Often enough 
 you are invited to sit in the best places, and 
 you love it, and enjoy the space, and the near 
 view of the stage, and good air. But if you
 
 Letters from G. G. 63 
 
 are a Bohemian, you don't mind the thousand 
 or two stairs to climb, and you don't mind the 
 fat German who sits behind you and has no 
 room for his knees except the middle of your 
 back, or the Italian next you, the menu of 
 whose dinner is not difficult to guess. You 
 are so glad you are there that nothing matters 
 but that the music should be there too. 
 
 And if you have a rich dinner of cold sau- 
 sage and cabbage salad, graham bread and 
 Croton water one night, just imagine how the 
 pheasant and champagne taste next night 
 when you dine at the Mansfields'. 
 
 And then, as you look at a five-cent piece 
 several times before you take a street-car, 
 think what joy it is when you visit people 
 who have carriages and automobiles, even 
 though you love to walk. 
 
 All this for the blessedness of receiving. Is 
 it necessary to speak of that of giving? Of 
 the brimming of the heart when one has had 
 a windfall in giving his share of it to the 
 neighbor who is having hard luck ? For bits
 
 64 Letters from G. G. 
 
 of luck drop out of the sky, and we only hap- 
 pen to catch them in our lap. If the next 
 hand is extended in deeper need, the prize was 
 meant for it, and it is a privilege to hand it 
 where it belongs. 
 
 There have been moments when, as in a 
 flash, the conviction has come to me that 
 things would not be always as they are, that 
 some day I should have large ease and plenty, 
 though the how and when and whence are still 
 in mist. But with the assurance came a sense 
 of haste (doubtless quite unnecessary). Let 
 me quickly, quickly get all there is to be got 
 out of this precious poverty. Before it is 
 over, let me discover and enjoy all there is in 
 it. Let me enjoy the opportunity it gives of 
 not caring at all whether the price of food is 
 high or low. If it is low, well and good. If 
 it is high, live on cheaper things, or do with 
 less, or do without. Now, you might call that 
 the exclusive prerogative of the rich, the not 
 caring whether food is dear or cheap. But I 
 maintain it is the privilege of the Bohemian.
 
 Letters from G. G. 65 
 
 If he has very few pennies to-day, he will buy 
 bread and cheese the price of those can 
 never become ruinous and if he has pennies 
 to-morrow, he will have anything he likes, 
 because he doesn't know how long those pen- 
 nies have to last. There is always the chance 
 of his having more to-morrow. If he has 
 fewer, he can go back to bread and cheese, or 
 just bread. 
 
 Ah, no ! Let me never be anything but one 
 of the Sparrows of the Lord. Let me only be 
 a Little Sister of the Rich. 'But if in the 
 course of human events it should be willed 
 that I acquire much gold, let me spend it in 
 becoming the Providence that gladdens the 
 hearts of my glad brothers. Let me become 
 a Big Sister to the Bohemians. 
 
 G. G., BROADWAY, NEW YORK, TO R. F. AT 
 HOME. 
 
 Winter. 
 
 I've been looking over bundles of old let- 
 ters, and I'm struck with a distressing point
 
 66 Letters from G. G. 
 
 in common among most of my correspondents. 
 
 What is your idea of the kingdom of heaven 
 on earth? Mine I'll tell you now is the 
 time when no one shall have any pet dislikes, 
 when every one shall like everything and 
 everybody. 
 
 I will, in my earthly paradise, generously 
 permit people to have preferences I'll stretch 
 the point so far as to let them express a slight, 
 but only a slight, leaning toward hearing the 
 heavenly choir sing the Hallelujah Chorus 
 rather than "No Wedding Bells for Me." But 
 they mustn't be too emphatic about it. They 
 must have room for "No Wedding Bells" and 
 "Mah Coal Black Lady," too, or it won't be 
 heaven. 
 
 There shall be no looking down on a neigh- 
 bor's delight in Sousa Marches, done by talk- 
 ing machines. 
 
 I'll have no such speeches as : "Oh ! You 
 like Tschaikowsky's Pathetique ? Seems to me 
 so sensational" ; or, "Yes ; I do like Beethoven, 
 but Mozart? Sugar and water!" What's
 
 Letters from G. G. 67 
 
 the matter with liking them all? They must 
 all be likable since somebody likes them. 
 
 Doesn't it make you sick, the thread of 
 pride people manage to wind into their voices 
 when they say : "I like big dogs, but not little 
 dogs" ; or, "I love horses and dogs, but I can't 
 abide cats." When, after all, "we are of one 
 blood thou and I, brother." 
 
 They seem to feel there is something very 
 precious about being precious. They accu- 
 mulate and hoard their dislikes, and hug them 
 to their hearts. They are the joy and pride 
 of their lives. 
 
 This one admires Gothic architecture, but 
 the Baroque style is nothing but ostentatious 
 bad taste and he likes blue, but pink is weak 
 and bad and cheap. Well, certainly, sky and 
 sea are of a lovely color, but what about day- 
 break carnations and palms of babies' hands? 
 
 One adores Fra Angelico, and wouldn't 
 give Mr. Sargent houseroom. He dotes on 
 Swinburne, and calls Wordsworth an old 
 bore. He thinks Italy the last word in all that
 
 68 Letters from G. G. 
 
 is beautiful, but Switzerland is a hideous hole 
 likes travel by water but not by land loves 
 Stevenson, damns Henry James, finally, 
 seems to think that the point in giving atten- 
 tion to anything in any line is to compare and 
 criticize, and not to squeeze out of it the very 
 last drop of pleasure it affords. 
 
 It doesn't in the least follow because one 
 loves the best that there is no room for the 
 rest. 
 
 Why, what is the ultimate end in looking on 
 at and taking part in this varied, glittering, 
 gorgeous pageant, anyway? It seems not 
 only so much saner, but so much easier to 
 like things. I'm not saying but that murder 
 is reprehensible and theft not to be encour- 
 aged. But like things. Like 'em all! Oc- 
 cupations, conditions, and moods and people 
 and works ! 
 
 At all events, it strikes me it would pay to 
 try to travel in that direction at least, and not 
 be forever propping up and adding to preju- 
 dices and antipathies.
 
 Letters from G. G. 69 
 
 You know about that old French lady and 
 the spinach. She was so glad she didn't like 
 spinach, because if she liked it she supposed 
 she should eat it, and she loathed it! Well, 
 there it is. 
 
 I don't pretend I haven't any dislikes, but I 
 chalk myself a good mark just as often as I 
 get rid of one. I've learned to like milk, and 
 I've stopped dreading to ride in an elevator, 
 and I'm getting to like Bach. Oh, yes ! I'm 
 getting there. 
 
 I knew a man once who said that his prayer 
 was: "Lord, give me this day my daily opin- 
 ion, and forgive me the one I had yesterday." 
 
 I think I shall make mine : "Give me my 
 daily liking, and strengthen those I've already 
 got." 
 
 Of course you will throw at me that it 
 would be a deadly dull world in which every 
 one agreed on every point. Well, perhaps; 
 only, remember, this is my idea of heaven I'm 
 talking about, not of a spicy world, and I 
 don't know that any one ever pretended that
 
 70 Letters from G. G. 
 
 heaven would be an exciting place. Every 
 one would be busy singing paeans in praise of 
 God's works. I suppose the only line in which 
 one could look for variety would be the mil- 
 lions of things to sing about. 
 
 I've a few more or less rabid dislikes left 
 of my own, but I'm looking to the time when 
 I can declare myself really catholic in taste, 
 and let me tell you, I pray the Lord to hasten 
 the day when I can truthfully say that I have 
 any use for Palestrina and parsnips, whist, 
 rum, spiders and golf. 
 
 G. G., BROADWAY, NEW YORK, TO R. F. AT 
 HOME. 
 
 Spring. 
 
 Guinea, dear, you are a great comfort. I 
 believe you are, like Jean, the only one of your 
 kind. One can say what one likes to you, 
 and it is like dropping a pebble into a bottom- 
 less pit, one never hears from it again. I 
 mean by that, that there are no consequences ; 
 that you never pull one up short and make
 
 Letters from G. G. 71 
 
 one argue or give account of what one says 
 or means. You understand. You accept it 
 with a smile for what it is worth, and send 
 one back your smiling reply, and give your 
 own experiences and opinions which may or 
 may equally agreeably not agree with one's 
 own. 
 
 Are you keeping tab? It's two years, 
 Guinea ! And don't you love to think it will 
 go on forever ? Let's keep it up forever. Let's 
 just sit like two demure China mandarins, 
 nodding and smiling at one another at our 
 thousand miles' distance, on and on and on, 
 down through the long perspective of the 
 years, on to the vanishing point. 
 
 But all things come to an end, you say. 
 Yes, I suppose so! and I dare say the end of 
 you, as far as I am concerned, will be that 
 some fine day you'll up and get engaged to 
 some girl or other. And then she won't let 
 you take the time to write me delightful, fat 
 bundles of stuff and then you'll lock me 
 up in a quiet little ornamental niche in your
 
 72 Letters from G. G. 
 
 heart (for I don't believe you'd throw me out 
 altogether), and then in time, you'll softly 
 and silently forget me! 
 
 Well, please tell me when that girl appears, 
 won't you? for she's bound to come, you 
 know, though I hope she may be 'way off in 
 the hazy, misty distance. I hope she's still 
 in swaddling clothes; or, at worst, running 
 around in sandals and frocks 'way above her 
 knees. 
 
 G. G., BROADWAY, NEW YORK, TO R. F. AT 
 HOME. 
 
 Spring. 
 
 Guinea ! 
 
 Really! for an intelligent member of so- 
 ciety you do occasionally say the most impos- 
 sible things. 
 
 I rubbed my eyes and looked again at your 
 letter, with its two astounding statements. I 
 held it near, and then I held it off at arm's 
 length, and couldn't make it look other than 
 queer.
 
 Letters from G. G. 73 
 
 How will they look to you, your words, 
 when I quote them, and you see them with a 
 fresh eye in bald black and white, after a fair- 
 ish number of days? 
 
 First: "I have always lived among" those 
 'who looked up to me in one way or another. 
 Do you know that you are the only woman 
 I ever knew whom I respected intellectually? 
 That's enough for autobiography. Is it too 
 ugly?" 
 
 Ugly? Oh, you poor dear! God ha' 
 mercy on you ! I can just imagine the sort of 
 fool women you've had to do with. Rich as 
 mud, and as dull ; or, no, not dull, for Ameri- 
 cans are all more or less bright. But foot- 
 less, maybe? inconsequent? And oh, how 
 bad for you, my child, to have 'em all gazing 
 up at you, and burning frankincense under 
 your nose! You are to be wept over if your 
 lot has been cast among women whom you so 
 scorned as to make you respect my poor head- 
 piece by comparison, for, Guinea, frankly, 
 you know, as from one man to another, the
 
 74 Letters from G. G. 
 
 head ain't where I come out strong. You, 
 maybe, haven't yet got on to how many kinds 
 of a goose I can be, but it is only a question 
 of time. That is a thing no amount of good 
 will or modesty can conceal. 
 
 And now, second: "One of the ways I 
 amuse myself is gambling. Are you addicted 
 to the vice, or can't you afford it? I don't 
 mean gambling in its grosser forms, but sim- 
 ply poker or bridge, among one's friends. 
 Why is it that gambling and love-making are 
 the only pastimes that have a permanent fas- 
 cination for adults of civilized races?" 
 
 Guinea Golden ! Honey Boy ! What things 
 to say! 
 
 No; I don't gamble. Not that I'm a bit 
 too good to. I should, I dare say, gamble if 
 I wanted to. I do plenty of other things I 
 can't afford to, only it would bore me to 
 death. 
 
 But to look upon love-making as a "pas- 
 time"! just another form of amusement! 
 
 Oh, very well! make love to me, then.
 
 Letters from G. G. 75 
 
 Splendid practice against the day that girl or 
 other comes along. And it would, besides, 
 be a nice tour de force, you know, something 
 worthy of a Cyrano, to make love to a myth 
 half a continent away. Something exquisitely 
 dainty in appealing to her heart through the 
 brain alone, without aid of look, or touch, or 
 speech, with neither the remembrance nor the 
 anticipation of the common modes of cam- 
 paign. 
 
 Oh, go on, Guinea, do ! I'm wild to see how 
 you'd come out of it! You epicure! You 
 lover of subtleties ! There's a dish ! 
 
 Usher in the Lover! What shall his name 
 be? Not Romney, for it is not Romney 
 Flagg who is to be my love, not the man I 
 knew in Paris. I've clean forgotten him. 
 Nor yet Guinea Golden, he's my best friend 
 my mental scrap-basket. 
 
 I know. His name, drawn from the same 
 poem as Guinea's, shall be Pleiad. 
 
 " I had a star in heaven, 
 One Pleiad was his name."
 
 76 Letters from G. G. 
 
 Of course, the lost Pleiad was a gentleman ! 
 And, being of a roving disposition, he strayed 
 away from his bunch of lady sisters and 
 I've found him ! 
 
 How shall I wake him up, this star of a 
 lover? In fairy tales and Wagner operas they 
 awaken them with a kiss a yard or more long, 
 don't they? 
 
 Well, then, herewith I send you a kiss. A 
 kiss, let me see 
 
 A kiss as sweet as the breath of pines. 
 
 As long as remorse. 
 
 As deep as the flood of the stars. 
 
 As elusive as the scent of violets. 
 
 As gay as a hollyhock. 
 
 As sad as twilight. 
 
 As fragrant as a bed of ferns. 
 
 As burning as the unexpected touch of ice. 
 
 As pure as the wind on the mountain top. 
 
 As tender as the song of days. 
 
 As fresh as the young sense of sweet. 
 
 As perfect as a pearl.
 
 Letters from G. G. 77 
 
 As never-to-be-forgotten as the first sight 
 of the sea. 
 
 Now, is that a starter? 
 
 Are you off? 
 
 It has taken me full half an hour to impro- 
 vise the above. 
 
 I don't know what to sign myself. Find 
 me a name, please, a Greek one, to match 
 Pleiad's. 
 
 The Night After. 
 
 Oh, Guinea ! ! 
 
 I had no sooner posted that wretched letter 
 this morning than I realized that I ought 
 never to have written, much less sent it. 
 
 Why, why I couldn't have stopped and 
 questioned the wisdom of it before the mouth 
 of the letter-box snapped at me, I don't know. 
 The click of it seemed to do something to my 
 head, and I stood stupidly at the street corner, 
 saying to myself: 
 
 "You idiot! What will Romney Flagg 
 think of you and your audacious invitation?"
 
 78 Letters from G. G. 
 
 What devil ever prompted it? 
 
 Please, dear boy, don't think ill of me that I 
 should, for a fantastic hour, have offered to 
 exchange my good friend for a spurious lover. 
 Don't think that I don't appreciate the value of 
 a real friend. 
 
 (Doesn't Olendorff, the infallible, assure us 
 that "Un ami sincere et vertueux est un tre- 
 sor!") 
 
 You'll wonder what in the world my object 
 could have been. Heavens! one doesn't have 
 to look very far for an object to almost any- 
 thing I do or say. Curiosity, my dear. In- 
 curable daughter-of-Eve curiosity! Just the 
 fun of seeing what the other fellow will do. 
 
 We are told that there are three games at 
 which man may not play life, love and death. 
 Ah ! but man does play at love. We all do ; 
 though perhaps not in cold blood. It is so 
 hard to tell where the play leaves off and the 
 earnest begins. And we all love love and 
 lovers, and we do believe them for the nonce,
 
 Letters from G. G. 79 
 
 though we know they lie when they do swear 
 that they are made of truth! 
 
 Please, please, please! destroy that horrid 
 letter, and forget all about it. 
 
 And that reminds me. I don't believe I've 
 ever told you my feeling about old letters. I 
 mean those that / have written. I simply 
 can't stand the thought of their accumulating 
 and piling up, each a little piece of me, lying 
 about at the mercy of chance. You never can 
 tell who may some time misread them. Fe- 
 male relatives, future sweethearts, lady sla- 
 vies, executors. 
 
 No letter has a right to live after it has 
 served its term, and the term of a letter lasts 
 until the following one has been received no 
 longer. So, if you've not already bravely 
 killed mine after answering them, won't you 
 please light a little bonfire? 
 
 I've had occasion to see old letters of mine. 
 It was like seeing my own ghost. It fright- 
 ened and sickened me. 
 
 Didn't I tell you I was all sorts of a fool?
 
 8o Letters from G. G. 
 
 Well, I'm crawling humbly enough about it. 
 That ought to disarm you. 
 
 Meekly, oh, meekly! 
 
 G. G. 
 
 G. G., BROADWAY, NEW YORK, TO R. F. AT 
 HOME. 
 
 Spring. 
 
 Just in time? Or too soon? Or too late? 
 I can't tell which. 
 
 Ought my last letter to have gone soon 
 enough to dam the flood of letters that Pleiad 
 was sending, or should it not have gone at all, 
 but let them flood? 
 
 Three letters from Pleiad! I read them 
 over and over, and don't know whether to be 
 sorry I have them, or sorry I wrote to stop 
 more of them. Help me, Guinea, to decide. 
 Had I waited twelve hours longer, I never in 
 this world should have found the courage to 
 write, countermanding the "audacious invita- 
 tion"; for, nice as you are, Guinea, you know 
 Pleiad is awful fetching, and I might have
 
 Letters from G. G. 81 
 
 thrown you over for him. I might not have 
 been able to bring myself to stick to you quite 
 so faithfully and unfalteringly as I did as I 
 do! 
 
 You see, after all, my virtue was rewarded. 
 I sent my penitent letter, spite of certain re- 
 gretful twinges at surrendering the lover, and 
 then, next morning, I awoke to have my curi- 
 osity satisfied when Pleiad's first note was 
 brought me with my breakfast. Two others 
 followed in the course of the next day. 
 
 I am satisfied, Guinea. My curiosity as to 
 just how cleverly you would carry on the 
 game is appeased. I don't think you need any 
 course of study against the day of writing to 
 that "girl or other." I think, you know, that 
 girl is going to be in luck, for Pleiad will 
 write her sweet things which his true heart 
 shall dictate not faked up out of the back of 
 his head, and if he is able to put such a pret- 
 tily sincere ring into the fascinating lies he 
 tells me, how delicious he'll be when he is in 
 earnest. Happy girl!
 
 82 Letters from G. G. 
 
 I quite hate to brush Pleiad aside, even 
 though I like you best, Guinea, since you are 
 real and he is imitation, and so I'm going to 
 ask you to give him some messages from me, 
 will you? Tell him, in the first place, that he 
 is very dear, and then tell him that I love him 
 (he wished to be reassured as to that, you 
 know, and I know you won't be jealous). 
 Then tell him that he must never, never, 
 NEVER attempt to see me face to face. Can't 
 he see, can't you see, that that would end 
 everything, spoil everything? Why, it 
 wouldn't do at all! Tell him to continue to 
 think of me as his "Lady o' Dreams," and 
 then tell him to write me again some time 
 some day LONG hence! I would not ex- 
 change you for him, but he might, just, once 
 in a way, send word; for love is so good 
 even the most shadowy semblance of it. Do 
 you remember Marguerite in "La Dame aux 
 Camelias," when she speaks to Gustave, who 
 has just told her that he is about to marry 
 Nichette : "Aime la bien mon bon Gustave
 
 Letters from G. G. 83 
 
 c'est si bon d'etre aime!" It is good to be 
 loved, and it is best to love. 
 
 Tell him that I shall think of him whenever 
 I see "lilacs glimmering white in the moon- 
 light, or burning with mysterious red glow 
 under the lamps," that I shall think, of him 
 whenever I am arrested by that annual "in- 
 tense, instantaneous, penetrating sense of 
 other springs gone by." 
 
 Tell him that I shall be with him whenever 
 I see, or hear, or feel anything beautiful and 
 sacred, and so shall, in a way, share it with 
 him. 
 
 And that is enough of messages for Pleiad 
 and that last is rather a large order ! 
 
 And did you think the kiss theatrical? It 
 hadn't struck me. I should call it rhetorical 
 rather than dramatic, wouldn't you? It 
 seemed to trouble Pleiad, and he wished to be 
 reassured about that, too, but I don't see how 
 I can reassure him, for I don't believe he 
 would have considered a literary kiss any im-
 
 84 Letters from G. G. 
 
 provement whatever on a theatrical one, do 
 you? 
 
 And about that kiss! What amusing dis- 
 coveries editors of collected letters must often 
 make ! Were any one to attempt that sort of 
 thing with my general correspondence, after I 
 am long dead, he would chuckle as he ran 
 across that kiss in its various stages of evolu- 
 tion. It started out in life a modest little thing 
 of only three attributes; it swelled to five 
 and see to what proportions Pleiad's had 
 jumped. And that may not be the end of it! 
 You never can tell. Pen kisses are most serv- 
 iceable assets. 
 
 Well, good-night, Guinea, Golden Friend, 
 for whom I resigned the lover who was not. 
 
 What a pretty name he found me! I hate 
 to resign that, too. 
 
 It is a bit difficult to write it in its Greek 
 lettering. So I sign 
 
 PHILOTA.
 
 Letters from G. G. 85 
 
 G. G., BROADWAY, NEW YORK, TO R. F. AT 
 HOME. 
 
 Spring. 
 (G. G. speaks very loud:) 
 
 Make him stop, Guinea ! Make him stop ! 
 or soon I shall have no voice, but an exasper- 
 ated squeal in which to bid you tell him to 
 stop. Who is he? What is this Pleiad of 
 the entrancing verses and the darling letters? 
 What is this spirit I have conjured up? Who 
 is it that has power to make me dream for 
 three whole days and nights, and long to come 
 from "my far castle in the sky" and confess, 
 
 "While cheeks flush red and hearts beat fast, 
 It is so fair, the Earth!" 
 
 My castle isn't in the sky (shades of Broad- 
 way) ! Nor are mine "star flowers," but oh, 
 how prettily he put it, Guinea! 
 
 Tell him to stop ! Make him stop ! He has 
 nothing to do with you or me or the case. He 
 is a myth a fabrication. He has nothing to 
 do with my friend of the frank and truthful
 
 86 Letters from G. G. 
 
 temper, and comfortable understanding, my 
 amico simpatico, even less with that shadowier 
 personage of years ago, the big, imposing, 
 something chill neighbor-at-table, whose eyes 
 I never remember to have seen smile. 
 
 Good gracious! No! He is so far from 
 you both, he belongs to another race. 
 (G. G. whispers very low:) 
 
 Lordy ! How I should love to think that I 
 should wake up to find another long letter in 
 the morning, and the next morning, and the 
 next, and the next and all mornings! 
 (G. G. shouts:) 
 
 BUT IT MUST NOT, SHALL NOT BE! for what, 
 oh, who is Pleiad? 
 
 G. G., B'WAY, TO R. F. AT HOME. 
 
 Spring. 
 NO! 
 
 The pretty little comedy of Love-Me-Love- 
 Me-Not is over. 
 
 OVER! Leaving no regrets behind, tho' 
 I can't help sighing at the thought of all those
 
 Letters from G. G. 87 
 
 potential unwritten letters of Pleiad's, which 
 he assures me were to have shown even more 
 his versatility, were to have been yet tenderer, 
 more impassioned, more light-hearted! 
 
 Ah, me! Do you know how rare they are, 
 the men who can write love letters? Pic- 
 turesque, entrancing ones, I mean. Not one 
 in seven thousand knows how to write, or, 
 for that matter, say more than "I love you," 
 and emphasize it by repetition ad lib., and by 
 proof of deed, maybe. The rarity of one who 
 can ring the soft fifty changes on that same 
 theme "I love you!" 
 
 And Pleiad could! ... did! 
 
 BUT . . . now listen: 
 
 There was once a Lady and a Bear. 
 
 This Lady was wont to hold converse with 
 this Bear, (he was a Polar Bear,) principally 
 about Honey, for even Ladies and Bears have 
 some tastes in common. One day the Bear 
 inadvertently spoke of Dancing, and the Lady 
 in derision cried out: "Dance, then, since you 
 speak so lightly of the Art !"
 
 88 Letters from G. G. 
 
 Well, the Bear danced, and his perform- 
 ance greatly astonished the Lady, so much so 
 that she was pleased to say that he danced 
 very prettily indeed, she joined the dance 
 herself for a measure or two. But ere it was 
 fairly started the Lady, who had expected en- 
 tertainment of a different sort, exclaimed: 
 "Hold it is unseemly I spoke but in 
 jest!" And the Bear, who was a wise Bear, 
 I trust, and knew as well as the Lady 
 whither such Dances led . . . obediently 
 ceased. 
 
 Now when it was all over . . . neither 
 could tell whence came the music to which 
 they had danced . . . and sometimes the 
 Music haunted her . . . and him ... 
 But pray remember: The Dance was over! 
 
 Yes, it is hard to be reconciled to Pleiad 
 and Philota being lost and gone forever. 
 
 Departed spirits are said to return once a 
 year. We have an All Saints' Day and an 
 All Souls' Day. Why not an All Lovers' Day ? 
 One on which our Lovers shali come back in
 
 Letters from G. G. 89 
 
 the form of one of those letters that "were to 
 have been." 
 
 They might write to one another on that 
 same day, and it should be their perfumed 
 task, like thrifty bees throughout the year, to 
 collect honey from all that there is of sweet 
 with which to freight that one letter with rap- 
 ture. 
 
 Say, when falls All Lovers' Day? 
 
 When the lilacs are in flower? 
 
 G. G., B'WAY, TO R. F., AT HOME. 
 
 Spring. 
 
 Two All Lovers' Days in the year? You 
 are right. A year is a long space to wait. 
 
 Very well. . . . The first Memorial 
 Day shall fall at the time of withered leaves. 
 
 It is certainly meet and very right that as 
 to each saint one day in the year is dedicated, 
 so two days in the year should be devoted to 
 lovers, for are there not in each case two 
 lovers ?
 
 90 Letters from G. G. 
 
 G. G., AT HOME, TO R. F., AT HOME. 
 
 Summer. 
 
 Oh, Guinea! It's so good to be home 
 again. I was so worn out when I left New 
 York, I was dizzy. But immediately I 
 started, all seemed to fall from me like a gar- 
 ment. Daisy blew me a stateroom on the 
 train, I hated so to put Mick in the baggage- 
 car, and on the road I felt like a weed in a 
 summer shower, and was almost myself before 
 arriving in Boston. 
 
 Dear Boston ! I believe for the first time in 
 my life, though I am native there and to the 
 manner born, I did it justice, and fell victim 
 to its charm. It was so restful, so seemly, 
 civilized and decent, after that delirious, ill- 
 bred New York. 
 
 I felt like an Elegy in a Country Church- 
 yard. 
 
 I had myself taken to the Pop Concert as 
 being the most devilish thing the town af- 
 forded, to let myself down easy, and I almost 
 wept for tenderness. On the stage those
 
 Letters from G. G. 91 
 
 dear old Symphony Orchestra duffers whose 
 faces I've known from a child there they 
 were, much the same as ever, playing like the 
 Lord's own angels, and all about, orderly non- 
 descript-looking people at the little tables, 
 drinking proper drinks and, one felt sure, 
 talking such proper talk ! 
 
 And then the Public Library. I had to go 
 and have a look at it, and on the benches in 
 the court there sat the same studious, rumi- 
 native, scholarly looking folks as of yore; 
 somehow they only grow in Boston. 
 
 Certainly the flavor of Boston is mighty 
 sweet and dignified, tho' it maybe does 
 pucker up one's mouth a little bit. The 
 Puritan Gladys was soothed and comforted, as 
 the Bohemian is intoxicated by New York. 
 
 But it is good to be Home ! It makes me so 
 deeply grateful for having two ears, two eyes, 
 a nose and a mouth, also two legs and a love 
 of walking. The days are one sweet succes- 
 sion of ... the same old things. You 
 know what I do down here.
 
 92 Letters from G. G. 
 
 And, oh, Guinea, the hours of lying in the 
 cool wind on the long empty sand, listen- 
 ing, and watching the sea's innumerable 
 laughter ! 
 
 G. G., AT HOME, TO R. F., AT HOME. 
 
 Summer. 
 
 Don't talk to me about "Tears, idle tears i" 
 Tears idle ? Just listen here : If a child wants 
 anything badly, what, from its cradle up, 
 does it do but cry for it? And doesn't it 
 the better part of the time get it? I'm not 
 saying that it is in all cases right it should, 
 but that it does. Neither am I saying that 
 throughout life it is to stand before the object 
 of its desire, shed tears, and then reach out 
 its hand and receive the prize. Wouldn't it 
 be funny to see people at every street corner 
 and show window gazing with tearful eyes at 
 whatever it was they wanted ! 
 
 No, but tears do seem to stand as symbol 
 for wanting very much something that one 
 seems in danger of not getting. And some-
 
 Letters from G. G. 93 
 
 how, if we seriously want things enough to 
 cry if we don't get them, it seems likely that 
 some one, other things being equal, will at 
 sight of our tears provide us with our heart's 
 desire. 
 
 I know of two cases, one that of a man and 
 one of a woman, both of them about as far re- 
 moved from weaklings, from incompetents, as 
 anything you can picture, both of them pillars 
 of society, real ones, and they each at a crisis, 
 got what they wanted (the man wanted a 
 large loan, the woman wanted a job) by being 
 unable to keep back the tears when they were 
 told they couldn't be accommodated with 
 what they knew they had to have. 
 
 Not long ago I, myself, had to do a very 
 large piece of work. I had to make a house 
 in great haste. It was a complicated piece of 
 business, and there were times when it seemed 
 as if I had undertaken the impossible. 
 
 Nothing helped me through tight places so 
 often as Mirabeau's good word : "Impossi- 
 ble? Ne me dites jamais ce bete de mot!"
 
 94 Letters from G. G. 
 
 Every one's advice was : "Do your best, and 
 never mind about the result. If you fail it 
 won't be your fault, so don't worry about it." 
 
 I've been guilty of giving that advice my- 
 self. I never shall again ; it irritated me so to 
 hear it. What! do my best and then be re- 
 signed to failure? Scarcely. 
 
 Do my best, yes ; but care, care, CARE ! Care 
 so much that one dismal, drizzly, sticky Tues- 
 day morning, when everything either went 
 wrong or was at a dead standstill, I retired to 
 my tents and sat on the floor and howled like 
 a fool, in full hearing of the sixty workmen 
 about the place. 
 
 I didn't do it with an eye to dramatic ef- 
 fect. I had to do it because the case was des- 
 perate and my heart was breaking. That 
 house had to be done, done most remarkably 
 well, and just as quickly, nay, quicker than 
 possible. It was literally a case of life and 
 death, and there seemed no power on earth 
 that could make those sixty carpenters, paint- 
 ers, paperers, electricians, plumbers, and Ital-
 
 Letters from G. G. 95 
 
 ians at work on the grounds realize it and feel 
 it but the sound of my sure-enough crying. 
 
 The various heads of departments got to- 
 gether thereupon, and when I came down, 
 sodden eyed, I found them holding council of 
 war. As I reappeared the contractor, dear 
 man, spoke, nervously rubbing the back 
 of his head with his hand: "Well . . . 
 well . . . well I guess we just got to 
 keep a-goin'." 
 
 From that hour I needed no longer stalk 
 the place like a caged panther urging and 
 hurrying on the work. I knew that every 
 man had full steam on. And they "kep' 
 a-goin' " until the thing was done. 
 
 Nor need you think that it was because I 
 was a woman and these workingmen had 
 chivalrous hearts in their sides. They were 
 chivalrous gentlemen, but though I may be 
 better and wiser, I'm not half so young or 
 good looking as I used to be. 
 
 Now what I mean is that it doesn't matter 
 what anybody wants. I'll repeat that, I don't
 
 96 Letters from G. G. 
 
 know how else to be specially emphatic. It 
 doesn't matter what anybody wants, whether 
 it is a cab or a meal, or a fortune, or a hus- 
 band, or to be good, if they want it enough 
 they will get it, whatever it is. If they don't 
 get it, it is because they didn't want it enough. 
 And as Goethe says something- somewhere to 
 the effect that as what we want in youth we 
 shall assuredly come by in age, and Emerson 
 adds that such being the case it behooves us 
 to be careful what we elect to want, so I say 
 that as we are bound to get what we want, if 
 we want it enough not to be able to help cry- 
 ing for it, if it looks as if we couldn't have 
 it, we've got to be very particular what we 
 cry about ! 
 Tears idle? Tears are as busy as a bee! 
 
 G. G., HOME, R. F., HOME. 
 
 Summer. 
 
 I write you to-day in great joy jubilant! 
 I have found me a great new friend, and 
 what is more splendid than a new friend?
 
 Letters from G. G. 97 
 
 You have said that you felt yourself free 
 to tell me things, feeling sure of a certain 
 shadowy understanding and sympathy. I 
 must do the same, for I want to shout to some 
 one in my glee over my great "find." 
 
 Years and years ago some one gave Kitty 
 the works of Walt Whitman. I opened them, 
 tasted them, and promptly spat them out, and, 
 with the arrogant self-sufficiency of extreme 
 youth, condemned them utterly, and relegated 
 them to a high, dark, unreachable mental 
 shelf. 
 
 This spring, in a collection of verse, I ran 
 across the "Song of the Open Road/' That 
 was enough. When I got here, I took down 
 the exiled volumes, and oh, my dear, I could 
 talk about them all night, only what's the use, 
 when they are there, and speak for themselves 
 louder than any one can for them? 
 
 He is like this Cape landscape, all big sky, 
 and big sea, and great booming wind and surf. 
 He gives one such a sense of freedom and 
 joy! How he does strip the rags from every
 
 98 Letters from G. G. 
 
 scare-crow. He "wears his hat as he pleases, 
 indoors or out !" How great and fearless and 
 loving he is! How he embraces everything, 
 from the highest to the meanest object in cre- 
 ation. How universal, how childlike and naif 
 and humorous he is ! How vigorous and wise 
 and calm ! 
 
 Is it not beautiful, the way people inevitably 
 come to one, when one is prepared to receive 
 them? "Oh, believe as thou livest, that every 
 sound that is spoken over the round world 
 which thou oughtest to hear will vibrate in 
 thine ear. Every proverb, every book, every 
 word that belongs to thee for aid or comfort 
 shall surely come home through open or wind- 
 ing passages. Every friend whom not thy 
 fantastic will, but the great and tender heart 
 within thee craveth . . ." 
 
 And all the rest of it. 
 
 I don't know which is nicer, the way wise 
 people like that one find out things and tell 
 one all about them, or the way one finds out 
 the truth for oneself in course of time. Seems
 
 Letters from G. G. 99 
 
 as if give us time, and there is time a-plenty 
 with all eternity ahead we were, after all, 
 stupid and stubborn and lazy as we mostly are, 
 all going to learn all about everything. How 
 good to eventually know all about it, this per- 
 plexing world with its blind alleys and black 
 holes! And W. W. makes you feel so sure 
 that it is very right, as indeed do all the great 
 fellows, don't they? 
 
 When I come down here, my delight is pull- 
 ing down great armfuls of my cronies from 
 their shelves, and. carrying them out to spend 
 the day in the hammock when all the chores 
 are done. And there I dip and browse here 
 and there, reviving old impressions, occa- 
 sionally gathering in a new one. . . . 
 
 There are two others beside W. W. whom I 
 specially love, and whom you must love, for 
 one loves one's friends to love one's friends. 
 One is Emily Dickinson, the other the 
 Shropshire Lad, A. E. Housman is his name. 
 
 She also is one of those unhampered ones, 
 who recognize no convention, is most espe-
 
 ioo Letters from G. G. 
 
 cially herself. She has a most insinuating 
 charm, combinations of words of hers creep 
 into one's brain and become fixed in one's vo- 
 cabulary, and no others will express the shade 
 of meaning so well. 
 
 As for the Shropshire Lad ! The things he 
 makes you feel by saying the simplest things 
 in the simplest way! Once you know him, 
 never again can you see mirroring water 
 without saying to yourself: 
 
 "Ah fair enough are sky and plain, 
 
 But I know fairer far; 
 They are as beautiful again 
 That in the water are . . ." 
 
 Nor will a spring pass without your realiz- 
 ing: 
 
 "Since to look at things in bloom 
 
 Fifty Springs are little room, 
 About the woodlands I will go, 
 To see the cherry hung with snow." 
 
 G. G., HOME, R. F., HOME. 
 
 Summer. 
 
 What you say of the "miraculous quality" 
 being a test of poetry, only goes one step
 
 Letters from G. G. 101 
 
 further to fix my idea of W. W. I don't 
 know that I have thought of his things as 
 poetry exactly chants rather. 
 
 You don't find any miracle in them? I 
 don't know what it is more fit to call the 
 buoyant elation with which I am filled after 
 reading him. 
 
 You must know that I don't swallow him 
 whole, that I, too, wince at much of him, that 
 his language and construction grate, that I 
 am tortured by this vulgar phraseology, but 
 . . . as he himself says: 
 
 'The words of my book . . . nothing, 
 The drift of it ... everything!" 
 
 And the drift of it! How it makes one 
 walk more erect, breathe deeper ! 
 
 Don't call him insincere! How can you? 
 Laugh at his "rude barbaric yawp" and wel- 
 come! But sincerity you shall grant him! 
 Could anything but a life of love of his fel- 
 lows have produced his work? You don't 
 believe he loved them all the time? Are vou
 
 IO2 Letters from G. G. 
 
 going to wonder at that? By what will you 
 judge people? Their low or their high water 
 marks? Every human creature must have 
 hours, days of discouragement with himself 
 and every one else, of mental and spiritual 
 nausea. Even "Nature sometimes like us is 
 caught without her diadem" but it isn't 
 fair to throw that at them as long as that is 
 not the mood they admit, or foster, or cher- 
 ish, or entertain, and certainly W. W. is pretty 
 consistent in his Hymns of Praise ! 
 
 You know, your attitude with regard to him 
 makes me think of that of the Man of Sense 
 in a verse I saw long ago, written a propos 
 of the Yellow Book. The last lines of it ran : 
 
 "Some said 'How clever,' some, 'How vile,' 
 The Man of Sense 'twixt yawn and smile 
 
 Just voted it a bore! 
 This Yellow Book of meaning dim 
 A yellow nuisance was to him, 
 
 And it was nothing more." 
 
 Now I think of it, I'm ready to bet large 
 moneys that as you don't like W. W., you did
 
 Letters from G. G. 103 
 
 like the contents of the Yellow Book, and all 
 that harvest of funny little Chap-books that 
 flourished at the same period. Deny it ! 
 
 I'm glad you like Emily Dickinson some- 
 what and loved the Shropshire Lad, even 
 though you quarrel with his unmanly much 
 talk of dead men. It seems to me rather in 
 character. He is but a Lad, and don't you 
 think the late teens and early twenties given 
 to that sort of harping ? It is the saddest time 
 in life, the most likely to be morbid. Dear, 
 dear! When I remember my black moods at 
 nineteen! When I was so acutely aware of 
 my dual nature, of being rather a good sort 
 of a little willing Horse hitched in harness 
 with a balky little brute of a Donkey. When 
 I think of the agony I went through before I 
 got accustomed to driving that ill-assorted 
 team, Myself, I wonder I'm here writing to 
 you unsuicided. Yes, there was a bottle of 
 allopathic aconite in mother's medicine cup- 
 board. I have spent hours in dark brooding 
 over that bottle. Don't laugh other than in-
 
 IO4 Letters from G. G. 
 
 diligently at the moods of Things in their 
 Teens. 
 
 I have a theory, do you know, that one feels 
 older at the end of one decade than at the be- 
 ginning of the next. One is old for one class 
 at twenty-nine, at thirty-one one is young for 
 the next. I have an uncanny foreboding that 
 at sixty-one I shall feel so juvenile that I shall 
 up and marry a boy in his twenties who will 
 beat me, and sell all me jools, and serve me 
 jolly right. 
 
 To PLEIAD, AT THE TIME OF FALLING LEAVES. 
 
 PLEIAD BELOVED! I could not write be- 
 fore. I tried, but there was so much I dared 
 not tell you, the repression of which made my 
 words sound hollow and perfunctory. But 
 since your letter has come I have to write. 
 C'est plus fort que moil And why should one 
 hesitate to speak one's heart to a star? "In 
 their distance stars are near us, while in their 
 nearness men are far."
 
 Letters from G. G. 105 
 
 Oh, my Love! You can never know what 
 your letter meant to me. How I longed for 
 it, craved it, died waiting for it ! How should 
 you? You could not guess all that it would 
 bring me. You could not know that I was 
 holding out beseeching hands to you for help, 
 help from my own weakness. That at night, 
 out under the silent stars, I was calling to 
 you: "Pleiad! Pleiad! Help me! Do not 
 let me fall into that most grim of horrors a 
 loveless marriage!" 
 
 I have times of knowing that it cannot come 
 to pass. I know it is impossible that I being 
 I should finally surrender. But the pressure 
 is so cruel at times. The force of gold in 
 dazzling quantities, and should I blush to 
 own it? Your Philota is not above a love of 
 ease, and the good things of life, and the 
 frocks and frills and exquisite appointments 
 that go with a great fortune. 
 
 I know it cannot really happen finally, but 
 at times, Pleiad, I am so afraid, so afraid! 
 For the strength of the chain is that of its
 
 io6 Letters from G. G. 
 
 weakest link, and perpetual dropping finally 
 wears away a stone, even a stony heart, and 
 the will opposing mine is one used to over- 
 riding mighty obstacles. 
 
 And so I called to you, "Help me to 
 strengthen the tottering bridge of my will, 
 that it may carry me over this black pitfall. 
 Make me to realize what Love and Life might 
 mean, spent upon the heart of one whose 
 qualities of mind and soul could fill the entire 
 imagination! My Phantom Lover! Hold me 
 with arms more restraining, with voice more 
 commanding, with eyes more magnetic, with 
 lips more compelling than any of mortal man 
 of flesh !" 
 
 And then . . . thank the generous 
 gods, your letter came! Your wonderful let- 
 ter, answering all my prayer, and making this 
 a different world ! 
 
 The hours that you picture, spent together 
 away from everything and everybody, entirely 
 at one, without shadow of past or to come 
 Paradise !
 
 Letters from G. G 107 
 
 No, beloved, nor soon, nor late, nor ever 
 shall we meet. I could not face you now. 
 Last year it might still have been. I could 
 have borne it smiling, but not now. We shall 
 never see one another. Were you in the next 
 room, and I hungering and aching for you, I 
 would turn and run away. How I should 
 dread to know that well, my pen was 
 mightier than I! Should you not be sorry 
 for me were I to find myself, my words, and 
 smiles not strong to equal my own written 
 ones? 
 
 No ; if we were to have met, it should have 
 been long ages past, maybe when we lived in 
 the glory of Greece. Then we would have met 
 and loved in deep-shaded laurel groves. Or 
 when you were the king of Babylon and I was 
 a Christian Slave. Or later, in the tragic Mid- 
 dle Ages, or even in the vapid period of pow- 
 der and patches we should have wandered 
 about the moonlit paths of a trim garden and 
 exchanged superficial, easily broken vows. 
 
 But . . . how should we meet to-
 
 io8 Letters from G. G. 
 
 day? In the first place, it would not in the 
 very least be you and I who should meet, but 
 those two very commonplace young mortals, 
 G. G. and R. F. 
 
 He in irreproachable cloth and linen would 
 call at 8.30 of an evening upon her in her best 
 gown. They would meet in a warm, com- 
 fortable, much berugged, bepictured, be- 
 cushioned lamplit room, meet with the short, 
 emphatic American handshake. He would 
 sit at ease in a big armchair, she on a divan, 
 and there for two or three hours they would 
 discuss everything under the light of Heaven, 
 from the price of coal, and comparative merits 
 of this or that brand of cigarettes, through 
 plays, books, music, pictures, sociology, phil- 
 osophy, and on out of sight through psychol- 
 ogy. Then again the hearty good comrade 
 handshake, "et puis, 'Bonsoir' !" and there an 
 end! 
 
 Oh, Pleiad! say you would not have it so? 
 Let us remain wise for them ! Our wisdom is 
 not folly. You must not call it so!
 
 Letters from G. G. 109 
 
 We shall not see pictures, hear music, read 
 together in your dear blue room. You will 
 not talk to me and tell me the things you never 
 dared tell any one. We shall not walk or 
 ride together, nor travel and see the strange 
 far lands and the walled cities crowned with 
 towers in the dark hills of Umbria. Nor 
 shall we watch the sunrise, or the moon drop 
 low upon the water. But, shall we not in a 
 sense divide every beauty in the universe? 
 Will not the nightly wonder of the first star in 
 Heaven bring our thoughts rushing together? 
 You will not kiss me but can you not imag- 
 ine it more vividly than another could 
 achieve ? 
 
 Above all, do not call our love wasted! 
 When was Love True Love ever wasted ? 
 
 You say you need me ... need me 
 . . . But, dear one, you have me ! You 
 and you only know Philota. For what is 
 Philota? A Fancy hovering in the Mind of 
 a Shadow. And what is Pleiad? A Dream 
 living in the Heart of a Myth.
 
 i io Letters from G. G. 
 
 And is it not of all things the most wonder- 
 ful and radiant and mysterious that you, your 
 very self, you who are emphatically not R. F., 
 that you who are the very breath and soul of 
 Love should be turning the tide and shaping 
 events in the life of G. G. by making for your- 
 self an existence in the spirit of Philota ? 
 
 The marvel of it ! For so it is ! You have 
 you are saving her from ... let me 
 not think from what! 
 
 You say you love me so greatly that it does 
 not matter whether I love you or not but 
 my own I do ... I do ... I do ... 
 
 G. G. TO R. F. 
 
 Autumn. 
 
 Tut Tut! No fair. That's not in the 
 Game not until Lilac Time ! 
 
 G. G., B'WAY, R. F. IN CALIFORNIA. 
 
 Winter. 
 
 The way winters have of coming to an end 
 before they have more than fairly begun!
 
 Letters from G. G. in 
 
 And nothing to show for them ! Yet here is 
 spring almost in sight. Month after month 
 has gone by, bringing no great change in this 
 existence so ever changing in minor details, 
 full of variety yet variety of one order and 
 weight, bringing no very fresh or vital new 
 element or impression. 
 
 I'm so glad to hear you are in California. 
 When this letter reaches you you will have 
 had many weeks' sun bath ; it is leaving me 
 in a belated blizzard, which makes your place 
 sound all the lovelier. And you are making 
 an Italian Garden! And in California, as I 
 remember it, things grow for you while you 
 wait, overnight, so that you'll see the result of 
 your many inventions and toil, and not your 
 descendants alone after you. 
 
 I was in California once, in your very town, 
 a whole winter long. I wore nothing for my 
 five months out there but riding clothes and 
 evening dress. 
 
 I learned to ride out there. I was a kid of 
 seventeen, and another kid taught me to do all
 
 ii2 Letters from G. G. 
 
 sorts of circus tricks. I blanch at the mem- 
 ory of the things I dared do at his bidding. 
 We rode every day and all day, sometimes en 
 cavalcade, with lots of people, but mostly 
 with two or three others, or by ourselves. 
 
 And the horse I had! Oh, my Billy, my 
 Billy! I wonder if he's still living and rac- 
 ing about with some other girl on his back! 
 Ask for him, will you, at Cardozo's Stable, 
 and give him sugar and spice and everything 
 nice for me ! Billy was the sweetest thing in 
 horses, part broncho, but also part excellent 
 racing blood. It was not so much that he was 
 rapid, but that he was so light he barely 
 touched the ground. His hoofs flicked the 
 hard-packed sand on the beach. You could 
 tell the print of his little shoes from any other 
 horse's, they were so faint and small. Where 
 other horses pounded, he fluttered, he almost 
 floated. I never hope to experience anything 
 so near the sensation of flying, as when we 
 raced along the beach. Oh, the music of the 
 hoofs, and the smell of the kelp, and the thun-
 
 Letters from G. G. 113 
 
 der of the surf, and the singing of the wind 
 in my ears and hair, and the feel of the air 
 wrapping me 'round as we shot along. Billy 
 never needed urging, at my cluck he was an 
 arrow let free. He loved to carry me, as I 
 loved to be carried ; he seemed to love his own 
 motion as much as ever I did, and to love me 
 as I did him. When I was not sitting on his 
 back, I was to be found sitting in his manger, 
 occupied with feeding him barley-beards, and 
 he had the coziest way of putting his nose on 
 my chest, and making that friendly confiden- 
 tial sound : "Hum-hum-hum-hum-hum-hum- 
 hum-hum-hum-hum " beginning on a high 
 note and hum-ing all down the scale. 
 
 Oh, seventeen ! seventeen ! The very begin- 
 ning of things! How bitterly old it makes 
 one feel to remember ! 
 
 But, do you tell me about your time out 
 there. Do you ride much, or do you eternally 
 sit at Bridge? What do you do beside make 
 Gardens? Do you make love in them? Do 
 you play with your fellow men and women?
 
 ii4 Letters from G. G. 
 
 With a fellow- woman ? Is that Girl around 
 yet? 
 
 Tell me ... tell me all about it! 
 
 G. G., B'WAY, R. F., CALIFORNIA. 
 
 Winter. 
 
 Do you know, I think mice are an awful 
 problem. As serious as a lot that are made 
 much more row about. Quite as serious to 
 most of us as well what are the things that 
 people are all the time getting serious about? 
 Race problems, and race suicide, and yellow 
 dangers, children and servants. We don't all 
 of us have servants and children, but not 
 many of us escape mice! 
 
 Now let me tell you: 
 
 Last summer when we went home to the 
 Cape and opened the house, we found that the 
 winter had witnessed a tragedy. The two 
 doors leading upstairs had been left open 
 when we closed the house the autumn before. 
 Either the wind, or the carpenter coming to 
 make repairs, had closed them, and crowded
 
 Letters from G. G. 115 
 
 against the door of the front staircase we 
 found six dead mice, at the foot of the back 
 stairs four ! Poor, tiny things ! We found 
 their nests, made of cotton-batting which they 
 had pulled out of a roll in the attic, one on my 
 bed, and one in Kitty's bureau drawer. And 
 everywhere we found little heaps of the shells 
 of wild-cherry stones, of which they had laid 
 in stores. I dare say they had elected to 
 live in the upper story, because even in winter 
 it is warm under the roof when the sun beats 
 on the timbers overhead. I suppose they died 
 from lack of water, or else their provisions 
 gave out. Anyway, for all that season, sad 
 as we were at their fate, we were joyously 
 free of mice. 
 
 This summer when we went home, the 
 house was overrun with them. We decided to 
 bear with them. After all, mice neither take 
 much room, nor much food; neither had we 
 found them so very destructive. Our toler- 
 ance made them very fearless and tame. I 
 have seen one come out of the brick oven and
 
 n6 Letters from G. G. 
 
 perch on the edge of the dogs' bowl and drink 
 while we were sitting at table! 
 
 Finally, however, it was borne in upon us 
 that mice are untidy things, and that if you 
 let them alone they will grow to such num- 
 bers as to make home unfit to live in. 
 
 For days we discussed what to do. We de- 
 termined to try the fabled remedy of writing 
 the mice a kind letter of warning, and giving 
 them a chance of their lives. Kitty composed 
 the notice, which ran: 
 
 Warning is hereby given to all mice, rats, 
 and creatures whatsoever, infesting these prem- 
 ises, that if they forthwith evacuate all holes, 
 wainscots and other habitations good! If 
 not, measures of the sternest will be taken by 
 the owners of said premises to rid said prem- 
 ises of said mice, rats and other creatures. 
 Signed, 
 
 K. GAY, 
 G. GAY, 
 
 Owners.
 
 Letters from G. G. 117 
 
 This we wrote on a full sheet of notepaper 
 in a clear, very legible hand. We posted it on 
 a bill-file, and stood the file on the dining- 
 room hearth. 
 
 There it was in full view for three days and 
 three nights. But the mice in pride of life 
 only chuckled in their holes. 
 
 Then was a trap bought ! And set ... ! 
 
 Next morning two wee things were found 
 in it, caught under their poor chins, the most 
 tragic expression of agony frozen on their 
 wretched little faces. With its front paws 
 one of them seemed struggling to push away 
 the brutal spring. 
 
 We buried them down near the fence, on 
 the edge of the grove behind the house. We 
 carried them wrapped in bits of an old hand- 
 kerchief for winding-sheets. Very lovely 
 winding-sheets embroidered with festoons of 
 daisies. Over the graves we planted two 
 pansies to mark the spot. 
 
 Next morning there were two more. These 
 we buried in a box. Kitty thought it would
 
 n8 Letters from G. G. 
 
 be truly gratifying to them to know that their 
 coffin marked them as "High Grade Mirror 
 Candies." Over them waved a sprig of 
 Bouncing Betty. 
 
 And so from day to day the row of graves 
 with their flowery marks grew, filled with 
 baby mice, and Father and Mother mice, un- 
 til the day dawned that we caught no more 
 because in all the house there was not one to 
 catch. 
 
 Well then, after that we had a great revul- 
 sion of feeling. We had taken too many dead 
 mice out of traps. We had seen enough of 
 mice we had killed! As we looked at them 
 we could not help marveling at their totty 
 paws, and fine, fine whiskers, and polished 
 eyes, and plushy coats. We were at a loss 
 to think of anything quite so pretty that we 
 knew how to manufacture. 
 
 In the fall I rescued one from drowning 
 in a pail. I could set a trap, but how can any 
 one let a mouse drown? 
 What to do with the thing !
 
 Letters from G. G. 119 
 
 I bought him a cage, one with a wheel, and 
 he ran splendid journeys in it. He loved to 
 run all night long, until I had to stick a hat- 
 pin through the wheel to keep it stationary. 
 There was no sleeping with it whirring. I 
 made him a cotton-wool bed, and gave him a 
 china water-color pan to drink out of, and he 
 was a happy mouse, I think, and died a happy 
 death, over-eating delicious corn. 
 
 After that, one day, Kitty was going down 
 Broadway with Mick, and a man came up to 
 her with a live baby mouse in his hand. 
 
 "May I give this to your dog?" 
 
 "You may give it to me," said Kitty, a lit- 
 tle grimly. Likely she'd feed Mick a live 
 mouse ! 
 
 She took it in her hand. The poor little 
 wretch was paralyzed with fright, and lay 
 perfectly still. Now she had taken it, Kitty 
 had her turn at deciding a mouse's fate. 
 
 She reasoned : "If I take it to the Park and 
 let it go, it will freeze. If I take it home, it 
 will probably be caught eventually, and any-
 
 I2O Letters from G. G. 
 
 way, that is no fair. If I take it to a small 
 provision shop, the shop's cat will eat it" 
 . . . and so she went on, making sugges- 
 tions and rejecting them. 
 
 What she did was to go to the grocery sec- 
 tion of a large department store, and place 
 the mouse unobtrusively behind a big case 
 of Uneeda Biscuits. 
 
 This may sound a very immoral tale, but 
 this is how she argued: 
 
 "If this is the only mouse in the establish- 
 ment, why . . . there is no harm done. 
 Where there is but one mouse, there is but 
 one mouse. And if there are already others, 
 why then . . . one more . . . one 
 less . . . ! 
 
 G. G., B'WAY, R. F., CALIFORNIA. 
 
 Winter. 
 
 I have just come in from hearing "Parsifal" 
 for the first time. 
 
 I don't think I could talk about it to most 
 people, perhaps to no one but you, Yet to
 
 Letters from G. G. 121 
 
 some one I must speak from an over-full heart. 
 I couldn't discuss it. It is a thing to revere, 
 not to discuss, any more than a Church Serv- 
 ice is to be discussed. 
 
 Oh, that Vorspiel ! It wouldn't matter much 
 what came after it, the spell is laid upon one, 
 the enchantment. If you have ears to hear, 
 you have understood it all before the play be- 
 gins, before the curtain rises upon the pleas- 
 ant scene of the old knight under the tree. 
 
 What a quality the music has! The qual- 
 ity of fervent mediaeval religion, the quality 
 of devoutness made into sound. 
 
 The music, the performance, the intensity 
 of my emotion while listening have left me 
 exhausted. I, like Kundry, should like to 
 sink down on a flight of convenient white 
 marble property steps, at the foot of the Al- 
 tar where glows the Grail, and breathe my 
 very, very last! 
 
 Don't you wish you could believe that when 
 the end comes, it might be the end indeed ? I 
 wish I could and I can't! I suppose it is
 
 .122 Letters from G. G. 
 
 too deeply ingrained, the belief, nay, the 
 knowledge, that this life is merely a tiny sec- 
 tion of the unbeginning, unending soul of us. 
 But I wish some one would convince me to 
 the contrary. I have moments of such intense 
 weariness at the thought of eternity, of the 
 enforced progress that we must make, willy- 
 nilly, of the advance through the Ages to 
 final perfection, the advance which, if we do 
 not hasten on now yet must be made, if not 
 now, later, some time, from which there is no 
 escape. "Oh, God in Heaven," I cry, "exter- 
 minate, annihilate me, spare me the long, long, 
 long, long road to your Divinity ! I'm willing 
 enough to worry along here, trying to be the 
 best sort of poor beggar I can, but for the 
 love of Mercy let it end here !" 
 
 Don't accuse me of going back or all I have 
 said of the glory, and beauty, and privilege of 
 life ! I repeat it all I love life, every instant 
 of it, but when it ends I shall have had 
 enough ! Perhaps because I have been so 
 happy all my life long I should be ready to
 
 Letters from G. G. 123 
 
 leave the game now without the feeling that 
 I had been defrauded. 
 
 "Ne plus rien connaitre, 
 Ne rien souvenir, 
 Ne jamais renaitre 
 Ni me rendormir, 
 Ne plus jamais etre, 
 Mais en bien finir, 
 Voila inon desir!" 
 
 G. G., B'WAY, R. F. f AT HOME. 
 
 Spring. 
 DEAR OLD GUINEA! 
 
 How I laughed over your letter! If it 
 was meant to cheer me out of the dumps I 
 wrote in last, it served its end. But it wasn't 
 dumps ailed me, you know, it was "that tired 
 feeling" raised to the power where counting 
 vanishes beyond human grasp and compre- 
 hension. I am not proud of the mood, and it 
 is not a frequent one, but the fact is, living is 
 a wearying process at best, and when one is a 
 woman working for a livelihood, the weariness 
 sometimes gets ground in too deep, that's all. 
 
 At any rate, I'm feeling cheerful enough
 
 124 Letters from G. G. 
 
 to-day for why? You'd never guess! I'm 
 going to Italy, to Montoro, for the whole 
 summer, for six good months! It is like a 
 fairy-tale, it is a miracle. It seemed too wild 
 a thing ever to hope, when Lady Grey's invi- 
 tation first came, but it is coming true, and I 
 know just how the raven-fed prophet felt! 
 
 I never recover from the wonder of my 
 amazing good fortune! The way things 
 spring up in my path like Hindoo magician's 
 flowers! First a bid to come to the rarest 
 place on earth. That is all very well, but 
 how to get there? The staunchest pedestrian 
 of my acquaintance can't walk the seas. It 
 looks as if I'd have to stay at home. What 
 then ? By the funniest circuitous route comes 
 a gift of a passage to Europe and back by 
 North German Lloyd Line! You see, that is 
 the form of sea-walking Faith takes to-day! 
 And then? For to visit among the quality 
 one must be properly clad why then, for 
 one thing, work, orders for miniatures gush 
 out of the rocks, and then the most complr
 
 Letters from G. G. 125 
 
 cated coincidences fill my wardrobe. So-and- 
 so gives me a braw blue hat, all nodding 
 plumes, it doesn't become her, it does me. 
 Good hat, but it doesn't seem to go with any 
 particular article of raiment I own ; and then, 
 like the tramp, I hold up a button to the Pro- 
 vider of Clothes, above, and ask will He kindly 
 furnish me a shirt to sew on to it, and from a 
 remote source, the Provider, whose ears are 
 needles, produces a blue cloth suit, a new 
 one, a darling, it matches the hat, seems made 
 for it! So-and-so has gone into mourning, 
 will I accept this thing? Now if it were any 
 one but me it wouldn't fit, but it is me so it 
 fits ! And so it goes ! If nothing else were 
 to hint to me what a fool I am, it would be 
 this question of luck. It's the richest thing! 
 Bank accounts are nothing to it! 
 
 Yes, next month I sail away in a big ship, 
 and go to the wonder of wonders, Montoro, 
 to be idle . . . oh, as for being idle! 
 Watch me! And there I shall renew my 
 youth, and leave behind me the drawn, hag-
 
 126 Letters from G. G. 
 
 gard, wrinkled feelings, and saturate myself 
 in perfume and melody (the nightingales 
 sing at Montoro day as well as night ! ) . 
 
 You'd better come, too! I SAY, wouldn't 
 it be nice ! It would be so nice, Guinea, that 
 in the words of G. Burgess, "I thank God on 
 my knees you are not to be there!" Think 
 of it, will you? If you were suddenly to do 
 the mad, delightful, impossible, forbidden 
 (mind, forbidden) thing! 
 
 Days when it is not too hot I mean to go 
 down into Florence and copy Titian's portrait 
 of the Duke of Norfolk in miniature. I am 
 madly in love with him, you know, that is, as 
 much of me as is not in love with Pleiad and 
 Jean de Reszke. He is in good company, 
 isn't he ? But think, while I painted, you could 
 read to me in a very low undertone, and to- 
 ward five o'clock we would go to Giacosa's 
 and have tea and brioches, or vermouth and 
 seltzer and pasticcini. And then the walks 
 about Montoro! There is a ruined chapel 
 there, such a sweet!
 
 Letters from G. G. 127 
 
 Isn't the spring a wonder ! One never gets 
 used to it, but it seems to me never before 
 have I known it so early, so balmy, so tender. 
 The florist shops won't let me pass by. I 
 stand with my nose glued to the pane. . . . 
 There are evening crocuses, a pinky lilac, they 
 are Kitty's soul, a pink not too gay, a lilac not 
 too sober. There are clouds of azaleas of 
 flesh color, pale yellow with a suggestion of 
 pink flush, like thin flame, like fire seen by 
 daylight, they are the color of my soul. 
 
 What color is yours ? A frank green nicely 
 shading into blue? 
 
 By the way, Pleiad's letter will be due just 
 about the time I arrive in Italy ... for 
 the sweet-breathed Lilac Time is coming! 
 Like Emily, I'd wind the months away in 
 balls the quicker to come to the day of his 
 letter! 
 
 G. G., B'WAY, R. R, AT HOME. 
 
 Spring. 
 
 I'm sailing on Thursday. Every cupboard 
 and drawer and box in the place is pouring
 
 128 Letters from G G. 
 
 forth my belongings. I have a new trunk the 
 size of a block of houses. Poor porters ! 
 
 Shall I miss you a little sometimes? Why 
 no, frankly, how should I? I shall miss 
 Guinea's letters if he doesn't write, Pleiad I 
 cannot miss, for him I wear in my heart of 
 hearts, him I have with me always, but miss 
 you, R. F. ? How should I? You were so 
 long ago ! 
 
 You accuse me of infidelity to Titian's Man 
 with the Glove, whom I loved and taught you 
 to love in Paris! I never said I was in love 
 with him ! He is not one to fall in love with. 
 I said I loved him, I do, and I am as con- 
 stant as the northern star. He is beautiful 
 and good, et je i'aime d 'amour tendre; but 
 the Duke of Norfolk? He makes me feel 
 like a small scullery maid peeping from behind 
 a shutter as he crosses the yard on his way to 
 Court. He makes me tremble, and my heart 
 chokes me. Look at him ! Think I would 
 ever dare step in his way? See his falcon 
 eye, and quivering nostril and nervous mouth,
 
 Letters from G. G. 129 
 
 and face all at white heat. He would take no 
 more heed of me than of a small fly on the 
 wall, or if he did, he'd crush me between 
 thumb and finger. I'm in love with him, oh, 
 yes, I am but deliver me from ever taking up 
 my abode in the same world with him. 
 
 I think that element of remoteness indis- 
 pensable with my falling in love. Do you sup- 
 pose I could be in love with Pleiad, as I am, 
 if there were any danger of his materializing? 
 My picturing delightful times doesn't really 
 "plague" you, does it? If I thought it did, 
 and I had time, I'd plague you some more, lots 
 more, but I have no time to-night. On the 
 square, Romney Flagg, on the level: Do you 
 suppose I ever could see you again? Why, I 
 couldn't look you in the face. I'd go through 
 the floor! and I'm not easily rattled, either. 
 If there were any chance of running into you 
 in Florence, I'd take to the woods. Now, 
 tiens le toi pour dit, once for all ! I mean it ! 
 
 Sorry you don't like the color of my soul ! 
 I adore pink! Unhealthy? Rubbish! Pink
 
 130 Letters from G. G. 
 
 is joyous and smiling and brave, and delicious, 
 and utterly lovable, and dear ! Am I sure my 
 soul is pink ? Why, I never said it was ! 
 Alas, no ! Would that it were ! But I live in 
 hopes it may grow pink some day if I peg 
 away at it hard enough. Some day I may 
 come to feel that it is blushing on the verge 
 of pinkhood! But it isn't yet, it is the color 
 of my azaleas ! 
 
 Yes, blue is lovely and sweet; but doesn't 
 it just the least bit in the world pat itself on 
 the back? 
 
 G. G., ON BOARD SHIP, R. F v AT HOME. 
 
 Spring. 
 
 There is yet another week ahead. I've been 
 out a week. It has been good weather, 
 mostly, but the first two days laid every one 
 low, below. The weather doesn't affect me. 
 An old gentleman, green about the mouth, told 
 me the other day he had never seen so tri- 
 umphant a sailor as I. I don't know why tri- 
 umphant, unless it is that my big red coat with
 
 Letters from G. G. 131 
 
 silver buttons does look rather arrogantly 
 cheerful. 
 
 I have spent much time at the stern staring 
 down like a Mahatma at the boiling, seething, 
 roaring wake. It looks like molten glass, 
 doesn't it, or the walls of the Ice Maiden's 
 palace. And at night the milky radiance of 
 the phosphorescence is enough to hypnotize 
 one into watching it until dawn. 
 
 I'm resting slowly, I came aboard too tired 
 to think or speak coherently. But I've slept 
 an absurd proportion of the time, and when 
 not sleeping have lain on deck with closed 
 eyes, listening to the rush of many waters, 
 and in the sight and sound of sea and sky 
 have been forgetting the ache and the pathos 
 of life, the heart-breaking pathos of people 
 all of us with our poor little ambitions and 
 vanities and makeshifts, and our angers and 
 impatiences, and, oh! our gratifications and 
 happinesses! It is to weep! 
 
 Thank Heaven, there is Nature, calm and
 
 132 Letters from G. G. 
 
 impersonal, and above all, dignified, and not 
 pathetic, to soothe her fretful children, in the 
 love of whom there is no pain. Is there any 
 love other than that of Nature to which there 
 is no suffering inevitably attached? 
 
 There is, without exception, the most deadly 
 respectable and dull collection of people on 
 board I ever crossed with. My oasis is an 
 Italian Doctor of the Royal Navy. He speaks 
 no English, and as no one else on board speaks 
 Italian, and as he is the most incessant chat- 
 terbox, as well as the most amusing creature 
 I've met this many a day on land or sea, with 
 the most enchanting smile, tho' not entirely 
 innocent of raillerie, and strangely illuminat- 
 ing an otherwise unattractive face (he has a 
 nose like a chicken's beak), and a most 
 searching sense of the ludicrous . . . 
 I've lost the beginning of that sentence. You 
 may have detected the fact that the wind is 
 blowing my hair and brains to the four quar- 
 ters.
 
 Letters from G. G. 133 
 
 A Week Later. 
 
 Oh, my dear ! oh, my dear ! oh, my dear ! 
 We arrived in Naples yesterday, and spent 
 the whole day there, a radiant day of intoxi- 
 cation ! The first draught of Italy certainly 
 does produce something which amounts to a 
 divine jag, one feels like a mild edition of a 
 Bacchante. 
 
 They go to one's brain, that light, that sky, 
 that air, that wonderful old-world flavor. We 
 are out of sight of land again and to-morrow 
 we land in Genoa, but it won't be the same. 
 It is that first whiff of Italy after two weeks 
 of sea in company with a lot of Anglo-Saxons 
 that makes the enchantment of Naples. Not 
 that alone, of course, but that which makes it 
 all so deliciously lovely ! 
 
 Oh, Lord ! Make me an Italian next time ! 
 How adorable they are ! How merry ! I've 
 owned up to you before that I fancy the lads 
 more than the lassies? Oh, the lads! I lost 
 my heart quite fifteen separate times during 
 the day to one lad more beautiful than the
 
 134 Letters from G. G. 
 
 next. In a cafe out on the Posilipo road there 
 were four young Bersaglieri who were dreams, 
 my dear, but dreams! 
 
 You know, they all affect me like a lot of 
 friendly dogs. They are so lovely to look at, 
 but they seem to have not quite the full com- 
 plement of human intelligence. When I think 
 of what the boredom would be at the end of 
 half an hour's talk with any one of those beau- 
 tiful boys! 
 
 As I looked at the miles upon miles of sweet 
 villas with balconies flooded with flowers 
 (pink geraniums in particular), and all sorts 
 of irregular corners and excrescences, all that 
 charm of the unexpected, I felt that I could 
 live and die happy in one of them, col mio 
 amato benc. In my dreams I shall inhabit 
 one of them with Pleiad. He was with me all 
 day yesterday. You might not guess it from 
 my much talk of those others, but he was, and 
 we had a wonderful time. We did all sorts 
 of things that tourists don't do. We lived a 
 whole year in the day in a pink villa, with a
 
 Letters from G. G. 135 
 
 loggi-ato, with scenery in funny perspective 
 painted on its walls, and oleanders and bam- 
 boos and orange-trees in jars, and ivy crawl- 
 ing" everywhere. We dined out there every 
 night and saw the stars come out, and wished 
 on the first one no, we didn't, for the wish 
 had all come true, and there was nothing left 
 to wish for, and we watched the boats go by 
 in the bay, and the fireflies, and we sat with 
 sprigs of orange-flower in our hands to in- 
 hale, and dreamed, and dreamed, and 
 dreamed; and the days were pearly, and the 
 nights enamel, and they followed one another 
 all too fast, that was the only pain in them, 
 and we were happy, Pleiad and Philota. 
 
 It was very nice, nicer than it could possibly 
 ever be in reality. That is the best part of 
 pretending, isn't it, that you can pretend 
 things so much more miraculous than they 
 ever could be. For instance, when one is 
 thinking a year in a pink villa with Pleiad 
 there are no fleas in it, there is nothing but 
 the smell of flowers in the air, and oneself is
 
 136 Letters from G. G. 
 
 not a very near-sighted New Englander with 
 a pug nose and irregular teeth ! 
 
 Florence. 
 
 Good to be here, but oh, how different from 
 Naples! How orderly and serene by com- 
 parison. No less lovely, but more gently aus- 
 tere. Not the same glamour, the same magic. 
 
 I've been to Giacosa's. I drank your 
 health in silence. That is not a newly discov- 
 ered drink, tho' it sounds so, but while every 
 one around me was sipping and gossiping, I 
 raised my glass and held it to the light. I 
 might have been supposed to be searching for 
 a crumb of cork in the amber fluid, but I was 
 in reality pledging you or Pleiad: "A toi, 
 fantome adorable et charmant!" 
 
 We had a little table by the window, Bar- 
 bara and I, and could see all the rest of the 
 room. Presently a number of Americans 
 came in and settled themselves at tables near 
 by. They were all of one party, but had to 
 divide up, for the tables are small. Two of
 
 Letters from G. G. 137 
 
 them sat where I could see both perfectly. 
 One was a youth of not more than twenty-five, 
 the other a woman of not less than forty, to 
 put it kindly. 
 
 He looked like a Greek statue come to life, 
 sweetly beautiful and noble and unconscious. 
 She was about as unattractive as it is per- 
 mitted woman to be : Sallow, thin, with color- 
 less limp hair, the hair that looks, as Viola 
 says, as if the rats had sucked it! She was 
 dowdy besides. If she had looked animated 
 one might have forgiven her, but she was 
 lumpish and stupid ; or if she had breathed an 
 atmosphere of sweetness and goodness, but 
 she didn't ! 
 
 They sat together, perfectly oblivious of all 
 around them, without a sign of self-conscious- 
 ness, he looking at her with his soul in his 
 eyes, she adoringly at him. 
 
 Presently she took off her gloves and laid 
 them beside her on the table. He reached out 
 and took them up, and held them against his 
 face, and then, absent-mindedly and very ten-
 
 138 Letters from G. G. 
 
 derly, kissed the tip of each glove-finger be- 
 fore putting them down again. The rest of 
 the party paid little or no attention to them, 
 and they seemed not to know that they were 
 not alone in the world. 
 
 I wondered for a moment if they might not 
 be Mother and Son, or Brother and Sister, 
 but no! The look on both their faces, es- 
 pecially his, was a flat denial of any such idea. 
 He was like one under a spell. 
 
 I called Barbara's attention to them, and 
 she was not slow to see why I had told her 
 to look. After gazing at them for a few mo- 
 ments, she turned back to me with eyes very 
 large and round, and eyebrows very high, and 
 said: 
 
 "That is a cruel sight !" 
 
 And we agreed that the days of black magic 
 were not past. 
 
 Black magic, was it? Likelier just plain 
 magic of Italy, Italy and spring-time.
 
 Letters from G. G. 139 
 
 G. G., MONTORO, NEAR FLORENCE, TO R. F., 
 AT HOME. 
 
 Summer. 
 
 DEAR GUINEA : You say you can't make me 
 out in Florence? Does my life here sound 
 so very unreal? Well it is almost unreal if 
 one thinks of life in a New York apartment 
 house, spent scrabbling through the weeks to 
 catch up with one's work and engagements as 
 real life! 
 
 I'll send you some photographs if they turn 
 out well, they'll give you the setting of my life 
 here. A life which flows without a ripple, se- 
 rene, peaceful, wonderful. I feel like a shell 
 in a deep, safe harbor. All here is harmony 
 and beauty, not a detail is out of tune. Each 
 day is flawless. It is like being in a convent, 
 in a way, or in an Adamless Eden. It is very 
 sweet, very restful. There is a dignity and 
 a beauty about everything surrounding Lady 
 Grey that makes life a constant delight to 
 the imagination and the senses. 
 
 Each morning I make what we call il bel
 
 140 Letters from G. G. 
 
 giro of the gardens. Properly done it takes 
 two hours. I dodder along slowly, slowly; I 
 look at everything, at every new bud and leaf 
 almost at every shadow of the clouds on the 
 hills, I smell of every new flower that has 
 blossomed overnight. I make long pauses on 
 sun-warmed benches, looking off over the val- 
 ley at Florence, azure and rose down yonder, 
 with the sun picking out a living diamond on 
 a roof here and there. 
 
 We literally see no one. There is one ex- 
 ception, an English woman who plays su- 
 perbly on the piano, comes every week and 
 plays Bach as I have never heard him played 
 before. I have never cared for him much un- 
 til now, but she is enough to convert any one ! 
 
 At night my balcony makes a most wonder- 
 ful bed. I am as on the top of a tower or in 
 a balloon. It is a fine thing to sleep there, a 
 finer to lie awake and watch the night's 
 changes see the color flow back into the gar- 
 den and turn it from gray and black to irides- 
 cent. To see Florence flooded with moon-
 
 Letters from G. G. 141 
 
 light, and then touched by the first glimmer of 
 day and then the sun. 
 
 You say you wonder if I'm happy and sup- 
 pose I am in spite of all ? In spite of what 
 my friend? Happy because of all. I can't 
 imagine anything that would make me un- 
 happy, any calamity, I mean. I can suffer, 
 of course, to any extent, but that is not the 
 same. I dare say a crime on my conscience, 
 "a killing sin," remorse, would make me un- 
 happy. And right here let me tell you that 
 I am in no present danger of displeasing you 
 by marrying, though when you so quaintly say 
 that you "wouldn't like it a bit if I were to 
 marry," you mean, don't you, if I were to 
 marry one whom I didn't love. Wouldn't you 
 love to have me marry one whom I truly 
 loved? Of course you would! No I came 
 near enough to the other monster to see the 
 whites of its eyes, and I had time to deliber- 
 ately turn away from what I saw lying behind 
 them before it could gobble me up. I call 
 myself a good woman, as women go that is,
 
 142 Letters from G. G. 
 
 I don't call myself a bad one, but I can imagine 
 a demoralization that would make me equal to 
 the worst. 
 
 You add that you suppose "the other thing 
 is not so pleasant either" what do you mean 
 by "the other thing?" Being a penniless old 
 maid ? Oh, my dear ! Don't you fret ! It has 
 its compensations, especially being the kind of 
 old maid 7 mean to be ! I don't intend to dry 
 up and blow away ! You watch and see what 
 a nice little old maid I shall be, and the kind 
 of penniless I shall be! It's rarely I have a 
 moment when I'd change my state with kings. 
 Penniless or no, old maid or no, believe me I 
 intend to love and be loved to my dying day 
 and after! What else counts? 
 
 Your speaking of me as more real to you 
 than people you saw only yesterday interests 
 me, it so bears out one of my deepest convic- 
 tions as to the meaning of association between 
 people. The object of their meeting is not 
 that they shall enjoy a long and happy com- 
 panionship. How many live together for a
 
 Letters from G. G. 143 
 
 half-century who have never truly met and 
 been a reality to one another at all, who re- 
 main strangers to the end ? The point is, that 
 meeting they shall recognize each other and 
 remember and understand. It matters noth- 
 ing, then, whether they meet for five minutes, 
 or a day, or a decade. 
 
 G. G., NEW YORK, TO R. F., AT HOME. 
 
 Autumn. 
 
 " Io ritornai dalla santissim' onda 
 Rifatto si, come piante novelle 
 Rinnovellate di novella fronda, 
 Puro e disposto a salire alle stelle." 
 
 G. G., B'WAY, TO R. F., AT HOME. 
 
 Autumn. 
 
 How did you know I was so inordinately 
 happy at getting home? The mere words of 
 my quotation need not necessarily have con- 
 veyed the impression, august and joyous 
 though the language of Dante is. I was fair 
 bursting with glee! And the feeling of it 
 must have reached you by some subtle me- 
 dium.
 
 144 Letters from G. G. 
 
 You know, of course, how much I like to go 
 to Europe ! How I go as often and stop over 
 there as long as I can ! How I love the whole 
 performance the getting ready to go, the 
 start, the journey, the arrival, and everything 
 about the stay over there! But, my dear 
 good friend, there is nothing in the whole 
 thing that comes up to the getting home ! 
 
 When I set foot on the steamer heading for 
 this side I am the child let out of school, the 
 prisoner coming out of a damp, dark dungeon 
 the uncorked champagne bottle. I'm all of 
 it! You just can't hold me down. I effer- 
 vesce all the way back, and I don't flatten for 
 weeks after landing, either. And it is not es- 
 pecially that I'm crazy to get back to my fam- 
 ily, and house, and dog it's just the joy of 
 getting to the U. S. A. 
 
 I have the feeling on landing that every- 
 thing in sight belongs to me. It's my New 
 York, and my Broadway, and my Park and 
 the people all over the place are my people,
 
 Letters from G. G. 145 
 
 every man, woman and child is mine, and I 
 know them, and they know me. 
 
 A while ago, just after landing, I was com- 
 ing down Fifth Avenue, and Daisy turned to 
 me after a long, cozy silence, and said: 
 
 "Would you mind telling me what you are 
 grinning at?" 
 
 "Oh, nothing," I answered idiotically. "I 
 just saw Lillian Russell go by in a hansom." 
 
 I don't know Lillian Russell, you know, but 
 just to see her drive in a cab made me feel 
 as if I were sitting by my warm fireside. 
 
 There's nothing like it. It's worth going 
 away from even if there were not raptures 
 awaiting one on the other side just for the 
 bliss of getting back ! 
 
 Shortly after my return I made a round of 
 visits in and near Boston and all over New 
 England. Such a good time! Visiting people 
 I dearly loved, being petted and spoiled and 
 purred over and shown off ! 
 
 Now I am back here in New York and try- 
 ing to settle down to work again.
 
 146 Letters from G. G. 
 
 There is nothing in the world so contagious 
 as irritability. You lift your eyebrows but 
 you shall see. You start from home on a 
 sweet fresh morn filled with peace and good 
 will toward women, you are in love with the 
 whole world, and not for the whole world 
 would you tread on any one's toes. You go 
 to buy a bargain veil. The counter is 
 crowded. The girl beyond it snippy and the 
 women before, behind and beside you beastly 
 rude. They try to brush you aside like a mos- 
 quito, and are so peevish at your being there 
 that you catch their ill temper, and if you were 
 not a Perfect Lady you might forget things 
 and be as ill-bred as they, having become in- 
 fected with the uncontrollably irritable mi- 
 crobe. 
 
 Now there is only one microbe more infec- 
 tious, that of unalterable amiability. In a 
 hand-to-hand set-to it is so sure to come out 
 ahead and does it so easily that the battle 
 doesn't seem fair. The victory is so inevita- 
 ble that it seems like betting on a dead sure
 
 Letters from G. G. 147 
 
 thing almost unsportsmanlike. It is so sure 
 to do the trick and the trick is so easy to do ! 
 
 What made me think of it was, that when I 
 was coming on here to New York from Bos- 
 ton the other day the train was crowded, at 
 least the common coaches were, and I was not 
 traveling in a parlor car that day. There are 
 feast days and fast days in my calendar, and 
 that day I was just getting to New York and 
 that was about all. 
 
 It was hot and very stuffy, and I searched 
 the train from end to end for an empty seat 
 before I found one beside a kind old gentle- 
 man. Across the aisle sat a lady with a young 
 son, fourteen or fifteen years old. They had 
 many, many parcels in the rack and on their 
 laps, and some had spread on to the little sin- 
 gle place opposite them, you know the little 
 seat with its back to the engine, right next to 
 the ice-water tank in some cars ? 
 
 A young woman who had arrived late was 
 having the same difficulty that I had had in 
 finding a place. I saw her hesitate as she
 
 148 Letters from G. G. 
 
 looked at the seat, with the parcels on it. 
 The mother and son were already so crowded 
 by their bundles that she visibly disliked sug- 
 gesting their giving up the space occupied 
 by their belongings. 
 
 They looked with determined absence of 
 mind out of the window. They weren't hear- 
 ing anything. She addressed herself to the 
 lady, and said that though she was very sorry 
 to crowd her, she feared she would have to 
 beg her to take her effects from the little seat 
 opposite her. The lady looked very fussed but 
 moved not a finger. 
 
 Then the boy began: "I don't see why you 
 can't find some other place! You can see for 
 yourself we are just as crowded and uncom- 
 fortable as we can be already" and on and 
 on but never a move moved he. 
 
 If I had been that girl or no if I had 
 been a big man how I should have taken that 
 boy and that woman and cracked their 
 heads together and pitched them swiftly out 
 of the train window. But this girl was a
 
 Letters from G. G. 149 
 
 Lady and made use of such weapons as she 
 possessed. 
 
 Her face became angelic, beaming kind. 
 Her smile sugary. Mind you, real sugar, un- 
 tinged with the least edge of irony, and look- 
 ing at the boy with gentle interest, she asked 
 quite simply, in a buttered pink plush voice: 
 
 "Would you like me to stand?" 
 
 His face blazed scarlet. 
 
 "No no of course not " he stam- 
 mered, and began hurriedly dumping the bun- 
 dles off the seat. 
 
 She took it with fitting thanks, but she 
 looked charmingly uncomfortable with her 
 back against the wall which gave no room for 
 the brim of her broad hat, and poked her head 
 forward, or made her sit bold upright. Be- 
 fore many miles the boy gruffly offered to 
 exchange seats with her, and let her face the 
 engine. She accepted with a grateful coo, 
 and the rest of the journey passed like any 
 other journey. 
 
 But honestly now, aside from its being so
 
 150 Letters from G. G. 
 
 much pleasanter all around, just looking at it 
 in the light of a paying investment, did you 
 ever know the like of it? 
 
 No expense and so much coming in! 
 
 At the Time of Withered Leaves. 
 
 Philota cannot write in answer to Pleiad's 
 letter in the same key 
 
 "Wanting is what? v 
 
 I can't tell, I only know that it can't be done. 
 It would take a certain mood, and moods do 
 not recur at will any more than do dreams. 
 Would that they did! Then we might make 
 a judicious selection of one very rosy mood 
 and one rosy illusion and subsist in them for- 
 ever. 
 
 To-night, and for days, I have felt very 
 matter of fact, very wide awake. 
 
 You fear that I shall think of you less often 
 now that I have left the Elysian Montoro, 
 and come back to earth again? You say I 
 seemed nearer to you there than here among 
 my four million friends? There is little time
 
 Letters from G. G. 151 
 
 when I am not thinking of you, my friend, of 
 Pleiad, that is. 
 
 You are puzzlea as to the exact relationship 
 to one another of yotfr three personalities? It 
 is easy to enlighten you : 
 
 Pleiad is the Perfect Lover, The One who is 
 just as I should wish him to be, The Best that 
 I am capable of inventing. He lives in my 
 imagination, and fills and possesses it. 
 
 Guinea is, let us say, the only visible ex- 
 pression that I have of Pleiad; he is Pleiad's 
 writing; he is the material form in which 
 Pleiad is presented to me; he is no more 
 Pleiad than the clothes are the man, even tho' 
 in a sense they bear his form, and as garments 
 suggest and represent a person even tho' they 
 disguise, so Guinea, in a way, stands for 
 Pleiad. 
 
 And you, R. F., where do you come in? 
 Why, you are that upon which Guinea de- 
 pends. Shall you mind being called a sort 
 of clothes-peg? 
 
 How great is the distance between the Lover,
 
 152 Letters from G. G. 
 
 Pleiad (for in my mind he is the real person, 
 you know), and the Peg (that's you), upon 
 which his clothes (Guinea) hang? That 
 . . . nobody knows ... I suspect they 
 are worlds apart, yet who shall say? 
 
 Here are the pictures of Montoro I prom- 
 ised you. Wonderful, aren't they? Of course 
 1 hated to leave it, and yet ... at the 
 end there were moments when I began to long 
 for the outside world again, for the company 
 of something beside women! Ladies are 
 first-rate for wet mornings and dry afternoons 
 . . . but, on a divine night ... in a 
 divine garden . . . with or without moon- 
 light, when you are decked in your loveliest, 
 charming clothes, charming thoughts . . . 
 
 I don't know the end of that speech, but 
 really, you know, Italy is no place for Old 
 Maids ! 
 
 When the gates of Paradise closed behind 
 me I'd have beamed upon Anyman, even had 
 he been a book-agent or a plumber. 
 
 So you are going to California again this
 
 Letters from G. G. 153 
 
 winter? What makes you? You went there 
 last year and I wanted you to go to Italy this 
 time, to Florence ! I wanted you to go there 
 and see so much that I had lately seen, I 
 wanted you to think of me as you sat before 
 the hush of the Perugino Crucifixion in the 
 Chapter House of Maria Maddalena dei Pazzi, 
 and as you looked at the Masaccio frescoes in 
 the Carmine, and in the forest of pillars in 
 the Santo Spirito; and I wanted you to greet 
 Michael Angelo's Brutus for me, in the Bar- 
 gello, and I wanted you to see me . 
 whenever you saw the blue haze filling up the 
 distant end of the street ; I wanted you not to 
 forget me for a single instant while you were 
 there, and I wanted you to ... but there, 
 what's the use, if you are going to California? 
 
 You ask me to tell you why I am "real" to 
 you ? realler than others ? No, I shall not tell 
 you. You discovered all by yourself that I 
 was real, didn't you? The why you may also 
 come upon by yourself, and if not, qu'importe? 
 
 Do you not suppose that Pleiad is real to
 
 154 Letters from G. G. 
 
 me? Why, he is the reallest thing in life! 
 So real that, as I told you last year at this 
 time he shaped my destiny ... he stood 
 like an Angel with Flaming Sword bar- 
 ring my path to destruction. Yes . . . 
 even so. His letter at that time, that remark- 
 able composition so filled with all the fervent 
 images that a vivid imagination could devise 
 of strong and splendid and exquisite and deli- 
 cate, tipped the scales in the right direction. 
 
 Are you curious? 
 
 Imagine a young woman with delicate 
 health, a slender, very slender talent, and a 
 purse both delicate and slender. Add to these 
 attributes a universal love of beautiful things, 
 and an absorbing love of pleasure. 
 
 Then imagine a Man, rich oh, brutally 
 rich weirdly successful, and terrifyingly 
 used to having his own way, buying it if it is 
 not given him, at all events getting it by fair 
 means or foul. 
 
 Then ask yourself the old riddle : What 
 would happen were an absolutely irresistible
 
 Letters from G. G. 155 
 
 force to come in contact with an absolutely 
 immovable object? And there you have it all 
 in your thimble. 
 
 I don't know the answer to that riddle, do 
 you? But I know that the meeting of those 
 two elements doesn't produce anything quiet 
 or comfy or cozy or restful or conducive to 
 peace and happiness. 
 
 You see, the point is: this young woman 
 was not prepared to give her hand unaccom- 
 panied by her heart, and further, it was not 
 as if she had been convinced that the Man 
 truly loved her. It is to be supposed that he 
 thought he did, according to his lights, but 
 her lights showed her that it was not love at 
 all. She simply had the gift of amusing him. 
 Therein lay the whole secret of it. She might 
 have been beautiful as the day and night, good 
 as good bread, and clever as Mr. Bernard 
 Shaw (she was none of this, but I'm just 
 talking). She might have been a Counsel of 
 Perfection, none of that would have been the 
 reason for the Man's determination to "win
 
 156 Letters from G. G. 
 
 out." What he liked was to laugh and be 
 distracted, what he wanted was to be amused ; 
 tho' she might not have been called in general 
 a particularly amusing person, she had a spe- 
 cific talent for amusing him. 
 
 Now does any one call that sufficient equip- 
 ment for being led up to the altar rail ? 
 
 Woe's me ! Think of having to be amusing 
 at breakfast ! or when you were coming down 
 with grippe, or after hearing Tristan and 
 Isolde, for so you must be, if your only appar- 
 ent excuse for living lay in being diverting! 
 Think of spending your life being shown off 
 in the character of raconteuse to the hordes 
 of your husband's business friends. Think of 
 having to go through your little bag of tricks 
 when you were made sick and faint at the bare 
 mention of them, of having to sit up and tell 
 stories, the edgier the better, and to imitate 
 Duse and Sara Bernhardt and Anna Held 
 and Yvette Guilbert, when you felt murderous 
 at the mere thought of them ! Think of shar- 
 ing your days with one to whom you were
 
 Letters from G. G. 157 
 
 practically a sealed book, one to whom cham- 
 ber after chamber of your soul was locked and 
 barred and bolted, airy chambers, and wind- 
 ing corridors, and fairly spacious halls of 
 which the Master of the House was unaware. 
 With one who had nothing to give you men- 
 tally or morally or spiritually, whose only 
 gifts must ever be of the sort paid for in coin, 
 even tho' in that direction he had all the ma- 
 terial realms of the world to spread out at 
 your feet. And further, with one who would 
 care not a jot for any small gift or grace of 
 mind and character that you might be able to 
 bestow upon him, one who would neither have 
 eyes to see them, nor taste for them if he did. 
 
 There then was the situation. The Girl 
 was poor, and the Man could afford to wait. 
 
 And then . . . and then . . . out 
 of the Ambient, out of the Spring, there ap- 
 peared a Lover, a spirit with wings tipped with 
 flame . . . who, by his setting forth of 
 "Ideas," made it so clear what Love should
 
 158 Letters from G. G. 
 
 be ... might be ... that the temp- 
 tation of "Things" became as nothing. 
 
 I say temptation, tho' according to Evelyn 
 Innes, temptation is no temptation if it can 
 be resisted, and by the light of the flaming 
 wing the temptation appeared not tempting at 
 all. 
 
 Why should one marry? 
 
 I don't see why any one should ever marry 
 anybody anyway! Unless, of course, they 
 positively couldn't live without them. And as 
 there has never lived a man I couldn't live 
 without, the conclusion is obvious that I have 
 never yet seen any one that I wanted to marry. 
 
 "What!" says you, "but you've been af- 
 fianced !" 
 
 "True, my friend," says I, "but that proves 
 nothing !" 
 
 I suppose I belong to what Anne in "Man 
 and Superman" calls the poetic temperament, 
 of which the born old maid tribe is composed, 
 "amiable, harmless, poetic."
 
 Letters from G. G. 159 
 
 Have you ever read Aylwin? Well, it's a 
 good story, but I'm not mentioning it for the 
 purpose of advising your reading it. I want 
 to quote a passage from it: 
 
 "Destiny, no doubt, in the Greek drama 
 concerns itself only with the Great. But who 
 are the Great? With the unseen powers 
 mysterious and imperious who govern while 
 they seem not to govern all that is seen, who 
 are the Great? In the world where man's 
 loftiest ambitions are to higher intelligences 
 childish dreams, where his highest knowledge 
 is ignorancej, where his strongest strength is 
 derision . . . who are the Great? Are 
 they not the few men, women and children on 
 the earth who greatly love?" 
 
 Now remember, I'm agreeing with that 
 definition of Greatness, but if it is true, are 
 there any Great Men running about now? 
 Tell me that; you, or Mr. Watts-Dunton, or 
 anybody ! 
 
 Don't turn around and tell me that there are 
 no women extant capable of inspiring any
 
 160 Letters from G. G. 
 
 very great or lasting passion. When was the 
 length or depth or intensity of love ever 
 gauged by the deserts or even by the charms 
 of the Beloved? Love is measured solely by 
 the Lover's capacity for loving. 
 
 By that gauge, no great women around 
 either, I expect you'll say? Well, I'm not in 
 so good a position to judge. 
 
 But I'll tell you a tale. 
 
 It is called the Tale of the Sceptic. 
 
 You see, there was once this girl who ar- 
 rived at the age when it is said one must begin 
 to "coiffer Sainte Catherine." 
 
 One day some one said to her, "Of course 
 I know you have had scores of adorers, and I 
 dare say you keep somewhere among your 
 possessions a most interesting collection of 
 memories and of love letters." 
 
 He said it in a wistful, discouraged voice, 
 with reproach brimming from his inveterately 
 childlike eyes, as who should say, "Couldn't 
 you have waited until I came ?" 
 
 This reminded the girl that down in the
 
 Letters from G. G. 161 
 
 country "down home," out in the woodshed, 
 she thought, or was it in the attic? was a 
 wooden box a soap box, crammed with love 
 letters. She had treasured them all carefully, 
 thinking that some day, long years hence 
 when all the world was old, when she was an 
 old maid it might be diverting, gently com- 
 forting and warming to sit by her fire corner 
 and read over those tender relics of her golden- 
 headed days. 
 
 When midsummer came and she went home 
 for the long warm quiet months, she searched 
 for the box. It was in the woodshed. She 
 had it carried up to the attic, and waited for 
 just the day, which should seem made for the 
 reviving of old memories, the calling up of 
 the tender light of a day that was dead. 
 
 It did not come until the fall, then in late 
 October dawned a day of returned summer 
 heat, with veiling mellowing mists. This was 
 just the time, she thought, the attic was just 
 the place, and she well she who had been 
 the loved one climbed up the steep stairs.
 
 162 Letters from G. G. 
 
 At last! it was open at last she had man- 
 aged to loosen one of the boards of the cover, 
 had twisted it sidewise and could put in her 
 hand far enough to bring out one fat bundle 
 after another. 
 
 One was tied with pink ribbon, one with 
 broad blue moire, one with a rubber strap 
 'which crumbled off as she touched it; one 
 with a violet cord and tassel, it had come 
 tied around such a bunch of violets ! There 
 were plenty tied with plain, stout, serviceable 
 string. 
 
 The attic was suffocating. The sun beat 
 down on the great planks and beams close 
 overhead. 
 
 She dragged the box near the window and 
 threw up the sash. A great puff of air rushed 
 in, cool and sweet scented. Is anything 
 sweeter than the wind blowing from the sea 
 over miles of pine woods and cedar swamps 
 and sweet fern and bay bush ! 
 
 Then she sat down on the floor, leaning 
 her back against a trunk, and began to read.
 
 Letters from G. G. 163 
 
 The house was very still. She read, and 
 read and read . . . 
 
 Here among the pink ribbon letters was one 
 which said: 
 
 "You will always be for me the only woman 
 in the world. That has been decreed by a 
 court from which there is no appeal." 
 
 Her first love! He was nineteen when he 
 wrote that to her sixteen. She had been 
 tremendously impressed when she had re- 
 ceived it ! She wondered now, with an indul- 
 gent smile, where he had found it, dear boy! 
 He was sweet in those days ! He was still 
 charming for that matter. He married and 
 went to live in Europe. The girl had seen him 
 a couple of years before. He had come on 
 a flying visit to New York, was sailing the 
 very next morning, but had looked her up. 
 She found him waiting when she came home 
 from a dinner party, and they sat down and 
 had one of their old chummy talks until an 
 unmentionably late hour. 
 
 "Of course he is happy" she murmured to
 
 164 Letters from G. G. 
 
 herself now "of course there is no court from 
 which there is no appeal !" 
 
 She read on. This was the blue ribbon 
 man. There were not many of his letters, but 
 the ribbon symbolized them. In one he said: 
 
 "I come of a tenacious clan, and I shall 
 never give up the hope of winning you, until 
 cither you are married to some one else 
 (which God forbid) or I am dead I never 
 loved a woman before, never even as boy did 
 I know what is called calf love. I shall never 
 love again." 
 
 "Oh, those nevers" she sighed. "How long 
 did they stand for?" Was it two or was it 
 three years later it was two that he married 
 the sweetest little smooth-haired, blue-eyed 
 woman in the world ! The girl loved her and 
 delighted in visiting them in their downy nest, 
 it was so cozy and hearty and full of friendli- 
 ness and cheer. 
 
 Here came the rubber strap man. What 
 memories of good times his handwriting called 
 up! Most of his letters were written on ath-
 
 Letters from G. G. 165 
 
 letic club paper, or yacht club, or golf club, 
 or some kind of club. He was the man who 
 first introduced her to college football games. 
 Those were the days when the sun rose and 
 set at Cambridge. He had also been the first 
 to take her canoeing on the river and he had 
 a racing yacht! 
 
 Here was a note, one of the last, in which 
 he said: "I may be foolish you have often 
 called me so, but the fact remains, that if you 
 stay in town, I stay and only if you leave, 
 and go where 1 can't follow you, shall I go on 
 the cruise. You know that I want to be 
 where you are, now and always always, tho j 
 you seem to have no room for me on earth." 
 
 Strangely enough, he had found the one 
 who was really the Right One in the course 
 of that very cruise ! The girl had met him in 
 the park the fall before, and he had said, smil- 
 ing: "You haven't changed a bit in all these 
 years! How do you do it? I wish you'd 
 come and see us. My wife wants so much to
 
 1 66 Letters from G. G. 
 
 know you. I've told her about you, you 
 
 know !" 
 
 Here was a diverting one. His letters were 
 
 written in purple ink, tied with a gold thread. 
 The dizzy climax he climbed to was: "For 
 me you are the whole show the whole 
 thing!" She doubted whether to-day he re- 
 membered her name! 
 
 And so on through the list and here 
 finally was one of whose letters there were 
 hundreds. They were written in every mood 
 of grave and gay, but the burden of their song 
 was ever this: "Life is not long enough to 
 prove my devotion to you. All time all eter- 
 nity will not suffice to show you the infinite 
 depth of my love !" 
 
 Ah me no all eternity had not been re- 
 quired eighteen months had sufficed. He 
 was the only one of them all who was not 
 married yet but, bless you! There was 
 time enough ! 
 
 She dropped the letters and looked out of 
 "-the window. The branches of the wild-cherry
 
 Letters from G. G. 167 
 
 tree made such a pretty pattern against the 
 blue. The blue was beginning to deepen, it 
 must have been not far from sundown. 
 
 She sat lost in thought. All feeling of time 
 seemed canceled. She could not have toid 
 at that moment whether she were living to- 
 day or a hundred years ago. The gallery of 
 these people who had been so real to her once, 
 so much a part of her life, seemed to rise and 
 pass before her like ghosts. All these sincere 
 protestations, and they had been sincere at the 
 time of writing she gave them that credit 
 had meant . . . what? 
 
 These swains had found others upon whom 
 to hang their vows, others who answered them 
 in their own key gave them food for more 
 vows, and a peg to hang their hearts upon. 
 They were married and were loving and faith- 
 ful spouses, as they would doubtless have been 
 had she herself married any one of them tho' 
 there the "if" that blocked the path was 
 too huge even to be peeped over ! 
 
 But what struck her with force was the fact
 
 1 68 Letters from G. G. 
 
 that she who had never made protestations of 
 undying fidelity, or exaggerated feeling of any 
 kind had been the only one to remain true to 
 her original sentiments. As much as she had 
 loved any of these individuals, she still loved 
 them to-day and she had been fond of each 
 in some measure, tho' in no case fond enough. 
 She was the only faithful ! 
 
 And he who had last reiterated the old re- 
 frain, the one who had been the immediate 
 cause of this unearthing of old love letters, 
 this wholesale resurrecting of past emotions 
 oh, dear me ... would he, too . . . ? 
 Why, of course! 
 
 Ah, well . . . she could have wept at 
 that thought had not a smile trembled in the 
 corner of her mouth or she could as easily 
 have laughed had there not been something 
 very like a tear in the corner of her eye ! 
 
 There . . . wasn't that a nice little 
 story ? 
 
 And all these many sheets I have covered 
 sum themselves up, after all, in the simple
 
 Letters from G. G. 169 
 
 statement that I suppose that I look for too 
 much from love. What I should look for in 
 the happiness that love would bring would be 
 something worth the loss of everything else* 
 It might be to the onlooker blind, unwise, un- 
 worthily bestowed, wasted, a sacrifice, a 
 crime, but to me, I should look for its making 
 the supreme heaven on earth. And you see 
 until I could experience so sizeable a pas- 
 sion, one which should fill that very large bill, 
 I must remain as I am . . . 
 
 And who has taught me this ? Who indeed 
 who but he who but my Star even before 
 I came into the world? 
 
 G. G., BROADWAY, R. F. AT HOME. 
 
 Winter. 
 
 A young Southern girl once said in my 
 hearing that she'd love to write a book ! She 
 didn't know whether she could or not, she'd 
 never tried, she knew anyhow that she "had 
 all the fine feelin's" to make one, but what she 
 was not sure of was whether she'd know how
 
 170 Letters from G. G. 
 
 to set 'em down but she supposed she could 
 learn, etc. 
 
 Now the book that is wanting to push its 
 way out of my head hasn't a glimmer of a 
 "fine feelin' " in it. In fact, as far as I can 
 make out, my book would be a descriptive 
 catalogue of the galleries making up the mu- 
 seum of more or less precious or grotesque 
 or foolish things that fill my memory. The 
 various corridors in mine, filled with speci- 
 mens, shall be labelled, for instance: "Scrub 
 Ladies I Have Employed." Doesn't that 
 resurrect them, the line of them? Can't you 
 see them there, standing single file : the bony, 
 the red-haired, the fat, the funny, the pretty- 
 ish, all waiting to be told about, each a char- 
 acter, an individuality, with some sort of a 
 history that makes a good yarn? 
 
 You've never had to do with Scrub Ladies, 
 of course. You'd have to supplement Type- 
 writer ladies in your volume. 
 
 Let me see now: "Intimate Enemies I 
 Have Made," "Adoptive Nieces that Have
 
 Letters from G. G. 171 
 
 Been Born to Me," "Hand-Painted Portraits 
 I Have Sat For/' "Garrets I Have Inhabited," 
 "Clothes, Pleasant and Unpleasant, I Have 
 Inherited," "Tragedies (my own) I Have 
 Lived to Laugh At," "Love I Have Recovered 
 From," "Dreams I Have Awakened From" 
 (the last three synonymous), "Spankings I 
 Have Richly Earned" Why, there's no end 
 to the chapters that immediately spring to 
 mind. Don't you call those thrilling and sug- 
 gestive topics? Don't they call up Harlequin 
 sets of tableaux in your own past? Doesn't 
 each heading open a door into a well-lighted 
 room lined with pictures, some dim with years, 
 others still paint-wet, portraying people and 
 things and events that you've known ? 
 
 Don't you want to write a companion vol- 
 ume to mine ? 
 
 Go ahead Guinea you begin! Tell me, 
 for instance: "The Merry Tale of Dear 
 Friends You Have Wanted to Kill," or of 
 "Engagements of Marriage You Have Neg- 
 lected to Keep."
 
 172 Letters from G. G. 
 
 My good four-year-old friend. It's a long 
 time, four years, to be friends, it is quite a 
 considerable fraction of our lives. What a lot 
 happens in four years ! How many dreams 
 are fulfilled how many hopes dispelled, how 
 many heart aches stilled how many fears 
 quelled (sounds like verse as I live!) how 
 many moods outlived! Even friendships and 
 loves have had time during that period to 
 spring up, to bloom, to flourish and die! 
 The seasons come and go and you and I 
 stand fast where we stood four years ago. 
 Don't you think it is nice ? So few things re- 
 main stationary, everything in the universe 
 seems either waxing or waning, growing or 
 decaying. I think of you to-day, I receive 
 your letters with the same keen thrill of ex- 
 pectancy and curiosity as I did at the begin- 
 ning ; I know strangely little of you, and yet I 
 think I knew you from the first hour.
 
 Letters from G. G. 173 
 
 G. G., FLORIDA, R. F. AT HOME. 
 
 Winter. 
 
 You see it had to be I had to be "sent 
 South" though that expression would seem 
 to suggest that I was an express parcel. I 
 was little better than a ridiculous limp bundle 
 of rags when I arrived, and I'm nothing to 
 boast of now. I've been beastly ill R. F. 
 and I reckon I am yet. If you are one of the 
 healthy, who have been wont heretofore to 
 sneer at the names "Nervous Prostration," 
 and "Nervous Collapse," let me a lay a stern 
 injunction upon you never to do it again! If 
 you do may you be forgiven for you know 
 not what you do ! I was once upon a time 
 that sort of a fool, among other kinds, myself, 
 but I've been learning things, learning them 
 "fast and frequent," and in such wise as not 
 to forget them in haste. 
 
 There is another nervous prostrate in this 
 house. God help her she's been at it for 
 three years! Good Heavens! is it possible I 
 may be in for such a siege as that? No, no,
 
 174 Letters from G. G. 
 
 no, no it simply couldn't be. I'd be dead 
 or well before that I'd make an end sooner. 
 As it is the roof has sometimes a ghastly and 
 insistent fascination for me. Don't be alarmed 
 those are words words words. 
 
 The other N. P. and I have long nerve-to- 
 nerve talks about our symptoms! It would 
 make any sane well person howl to see us sit- 
 ting close with eyes dilate and agoggle with 
 horror uttering in shuddering whispers : 
 "And do you sometimes feel as if feathers 
 were growing all over you ?" 
 
 "No but I feel as if my tongue and my 
 fingers were the consistency of those egg bis- 
 cuits, you know cracknells, dry and brittle 
 and floury, and as if I should break them off if 
 I were not very careful !" 
 
 "Oh-h-h-h-h-h-h ! I know that sensation ! 
 And do you ever, in the night, feel as if you 
 were growing and growing and GROWING and 
 GROWING until you filled the room and 
 would presently fill all the world?" 
 
 "Yes! and don't you sometimes feel as if
 
 Letters from G. G. 175 
 
 you were growing smaller and smaller and 
 smaller and smaller, and would in just 
 one more moment dwindle and disappear en- 
 tirely?" And nothing can picture to you the 
 genuine anguish that these absurd illusions 
 represent, though as I said before, you whose 
 nerves are solid would look upon us as two 
 mild lunatics, and that, I suppose, in a meas- 
 ure is what we are . . . 
 
 The horror is in not knowing where it will 
 end. Not being able to entirely control one's 
 thoughts and motions and speech. 
 
 That is why I shrieked the other day when 
 I found that I couldn't keep one of my feet 
 still it would jerk, and my toes would wig- 
 gle ! Any sane person would have said to 
 me: "Why, for pity's sake, let 'em wiggle 
 where's the harm? and don't make such a 
 row !" But the horror lies in the fact that if 
 you can't keep your toes from wiggling may- 
 be oh, maybe presently you'll be unable to
 
 176 Letters from G. G. 
 
 make your tongue obey, and you'll be hearing 
 it utter gibberish ! 
 
 Oh, the nights ! I think they have contained 
 enough of Hell to punish me for all my sins 
 past and to come ! 
 
 Mostly I lie on a cot, on a covered veran- 
 da. The branches of a huge live oak almost 
 sweep me off it on a windy night. The tree is 
 full of birds ; at exactly four in the morning a 
 blue jay rings the alarm clock, for the score 
 of other kinds of birds, and then such a fuss ! 
 They all begin their practice for the day ; it is 
 as if they were all trying their voices, clearing 
 their throats, doing exercises, trills and scales 
 and snatches of melody to be performed later 
 on. 
 
 I don't speak of that as a part of the tor- 
 ment of the night, quite the contrary; the 
 night and the dawn are full of the sounds of 
 living creatures that help me to feel that the 
 time is passing and that if only I can hold out 
 and wait for it, day will come!
 
 Letters from G. G. 177 
 
 Some nights when it is clear and dry, I take 
 my bed out on the roof, and there lying on my 
 back, with nothing overhead, I can watch at 
 ease the stately procession of the stars. 
 
 I spell out the constellations on a map of 
 the heavens, by day, and verify them in the 
 sky by night. I have plenty of time for the 
 night when I sleep three hours is a sweet and 
 rare one 
 
 In the face of the incredibly cool statements 
 of astronomy, how utterly silly the fear of 
 sleeplessness seems! Me and me narves 
 dwindle down to our proper dimensions when 
 we are told the size and distance of Sirius, 
 hundreds and hundreds of times the size of 
 our Sun and look at him! 
 
 Oh, the heavenly restfulness and security 
 that come of realizing oneself part of a scheme 
 so vast and so precise ! It does seem as if one 
 ought to find breathing easy with so much 
 space; one ought not to feel crowded and 
 cramped with so much room! 
 
 I invite you to go a-visiting the stars with
 
 178 Letters from G. G. 
 
 me some time. We'll make an extensive tour. 
 We'll play upon the Lyre, and ride behind the 
 Swan and on the Dolphin's back, and we'll go 
 and pick flowers on Jupiter where it is always 
 spring. Which reminds me I shall miss the 
 spring this year. There is none to speak of 
 down here, and it will be over by the time I 
 go North. It is really distressing, for there 
 are so few springs in a lifetime at best, and to 
 miss the charming sights of the world seems 
 like not living at all. 
 
 It has taken days and days and days and 
 days to write you. Since I last wrote I've 
 been much worse; I believe I'm losing ground. 
 I am so exhausted that it seems impossible I 
 should continue much longer to make the ef- 
 fort to draw breath. 
 
 Is it dying I am doing? I'm not afraid to 
 go but I also appear to be such an uncon- 
 scionable time doing it ; I'm afraid my courage 
 may give out. I'd like to do it nicely, with 
 head up and if it takes much longer I'm
 
 Letters from G. G. 179 
 
 afraid I may have to do it crawling and ab- 
 ject. In any case, I feel I must be about pull- 
 ing up the weeds in my heart, lest I carry un- 
 desirable things with me into the next world. 
 I ought to make ready for I am not fit to go 
 without ceremony into God's presence. I fear 
 that I have never lived in it. 
 
 Your letter came the other day. I am so 
 glad to hear that you are going to Italy! 
 How nice ! I almost take your going as a per- 
 sonal favor, I am so delighted by it. How 
 splendid it sounds ! A tour in your motor 
 through Italy, France and Germany! I hope 
 you'll enjoy it as much as it sounds as if you 
 ought. 
 
 You ask for credentials that will admit you 
 to Montoro. Here they are and another to 
 another friend near Florence. You'll find her 
 a dear and so good to look at, and she lives 
 in a charming Villa also. I wish I were to be 
 there to show you things ! But as I am now 
 I should not be of much use to you.
 
 180 Letters from G. G. 
 
 Do you remember it was from Florence you 
 first wrote me? 
 
 I want to ask you to do something for me in 
 Florence but it will have to be another day 
 this must go now to catch you, and I have for- 
 gotten how to hurry. 
 
 God go with you, dear Pilgrim. 
 
 G. G., FLORIDA, R. F., ITALY. 
 
 Spring. 
 
 We went to a festival at the Santissima 
 Annunziata one Sunday, Kitty and I. It was 
 fearful and wonderful how little air and how 
 many people and lighted candles and burning 
 incense-cages were crowded into the place. 
 The little air was owing to the many candles. 
 The least draught would have set them all 
 a-flaring and a-guttering. The many people 
 were there to see the spectacle of the many 
 golden sparkling candlelights. The much in- 
 cense was burnt and sent up its heavy sweet- 
 ness (and it needed to be sweet) because of the 
 many people ; and again, because of the many
 
 Letters from G. G. 181 
 
 people, the little air and the circle is com- 
 plete. 
 
 I stayed as near as possible to the main en- 
 trance, where an occasional breath from out- 
 side battered its way in past the heavy curtain 
 barring the great doorway. I stood near the 
 silver altar of the Miraculous Virgin, and I 
 along with the crowd sent up my own little 
 private prayer that She bring me to the Land 
 of Heart's Desire. I promised that if She 
 would, I'd give Her the biggest sterling silver 
 votive heart ever manufactured. 
 
 So many other mortals were standing and 
 sitting and kneeling there beside that altar, all 
 addressing themselves to Her, that She hear 
 and intercede for them with Him, that they 
 might receive whatever it was they craved, or 
 be given patience and resignation to do with- 
 out. 
 
 With the rest I went up to the altar arid 
 right devoutly kissed the right-hand corner of 
 the silver slab, carried on the current of the 
 surrounding Catholic faith and devotion
 
 1 82 Letters from G. G. 
 
 . . . and then, Yankee that I am, with 
 certain simple notions of hygiene and mi- 
 crobes and what-not I suddenly nervously 
 battled my way out of the poisonous air to 
 the door, and dashed for home, to inhale cre- 
 osote and gargle Listerine ! 
 
 Kitty, carried away by neither the fervor of 
 prayer, nor panic fear of contagion, stayed 
 sanely on, and came home in time for lunch, 
 having waited until the service was over, and 
 stopped to see the candles put out by two men 
 in white gowns, climbing tall ladders, and 
 bearing extinguishers on the end of long poles, 
 and acting symmetrically in unison, one on 
 either side of the High Altar. 
 
 At lunch she said : "I want you to go with 
 me after we've finished eating. I want to 
 show you something." 
 
 She wouldn't tell me what, and I followed 
 somewhat mystified. She had a parcel, rather 
 large, in hand. She led me to the Piazza of 
 the Annunziata. You know the Foundlings' 
 Hospital, the Innocenti, is on the left of the
 
 Letters from G. G. 183 
 
 church. To the right is another building, it 
 looks rather like the Innocenti. A flight of 
 several steps leads up to the colonnade that 
 forms the entire lower story front of it. In 
 the face of one of the lower steps is a series 
 of semi-circular openings, grated, all but two. 
 Kitty stopped there, at the open holes ; she was 
 most mysterious and I most curious. 
 
 She opened her parcel, it was full of scraps 
 and bones; she dropped bits of meat at each 
 of the openings, and then ... I shall 
 never forget. . . . 
 
 She, Ignorance, plunged upon the food from 
 one of the holes, with a murderous hiss and 
 snarl, and vanished back into her dark cavern 
 with it ; and slowly, timidly, apologetically, he, 
 Poor Old One, crept out and sniffed appre- 
 ciatively at his little scrap, and then settled 
 down to the near forgotten ceremony of feed- 
 ing himself to real food ! 
 
 Piece after piece we placed before the holes, 
 and time after time she accepted hers with 
 curses and imprecations, he with humility
 
 184 Letters from G. G. 
 
 and thanks. I don't know which was the more 
 pitiful object. Ignorance (we came to call 
 her that in the course of many days' acquain- 
 tance) was a small yellow gutter cat, she 
 could never have been other ; she was, her fig- 
 ure announced, doing her best to perform a 
 good mother's duty by a family somewhere in 
 that pestilential recess under the steps, but 
 nothing so emaciated ever existed outside a 
 caricature cat in a comic paper. She had no 
 neck to speak of, her head, fastened to her 
 body by a spine and no more, was all hate 
 glaring sulphurous eyes, enormous bat ears, 
 and spitting grin; she was the shape of a 
 knife blade, and her fur was all in tatters, off 
 in patches, from battles and mange. Her poor 
 twig of a tail lashed sullenly, and she was 
 weak, so weak, but for the intense strength of 
 her resentment and venom against all the 
 world. After the first few courses in her 
 meal, when she no longer needed, hunger- 
 driven, to pounce like a flash upon her prize, 
 she seemed to take comfort in lying just with-
 
 Letters from G. G. 185 
 
 in the mouth of her cave, like a wild beast in 
 its lair, growling and hissing insults at us for 
 standing there watching her. She said in in- 
 telligible, unmistakable cat talk : "Give it here 
 all at once, give it quick, and get out of my 
 sight, and curses on you 1" 
 
 And he, Poor Old One, had belonged to 
 people once, I think, one could tell by his rem- 
 nants of sweet manners ; a tortoise-shell, as far 
 as one could make out from the few shreds of 
 fur remaining on him, but oh ! the unfortu- 
 nate! he was a crazy patchwork of scars and 
 wounds and sores and scaly scabs, and I don't 
 believe he could see. . . . 
 
 But he crouched half-in, half-out of his 
 hole, and crunched his bones and food, making 
 a rattling, raucous sound that intended to be 
 a purr, but had got all distorted and queer be- 
 cause he had seen such sad, bad times ! and 
 when he had finished one bit, he held up. a 
 tragic sightless head, sniffing the air for more i 
 
 Kitty had seen them first upon coming out 
 of the church in the morning. They had ven-
 
 1 86 Letters from G. G. 
 
 tured out of their holes, and were lapping a 
 few drops of water blown out of the fountain 
 into a little puddle between two stones, and 
 Ignorance had smelled hungrily at an old bit 
 of orange-peel. 
 
 There are no areaways in Florence, no gar- 
 bage cans where gutter cats can scrape a liv- 
 ing, there's nothing for them . , . noth- 
 ing. . . . There was a custom once, such 
 a kind one for the kitties : At noon each day a 
 monk from the Church of San Lorenzo used 
 to give food to any cats that wanted it enough 
 to come to him for it, and oh ! there were 
 plenty in waiting for him ! But what has be- 
 come of the custom? Where bides the good 
 Saint o' Cat's Meat? 
 
 Well, that Sunday began it. Every day 
 after, until we came away from Florence five 
 weeks later, either Kitty or I, or both, carried 
 food to the starvelings. 
 
 Once, for three days Poor Old One didn't 
 appear. We put food at his door, but Igno- 
 rance ate it as well as her own. We wondered
 
 Letters from G. G. 187 
 
 if she had not perhaps made way with him for 
 the sake of his share, killed him for his Life 
 Insurance, but presently he reappeared. She 
 was always there in waiting, growling the 
 moment she heard our footsteps. And so it 
 was to the end. On the last day Poor Old 
 One came out, and made a pathetic, dreadful 
 attempt to rub up against Kitty's skirt, but 
 Ignorance, wild-cat, hell-cat, if anything 
 loathed us more poisonously the last day than 
 the first. Dear, dear, dear, how she detested 
 us! 
 
 Anyway, they both had one spell in their 
 lives of sleeping on full stomachs ! 
 
 And I reckon there's a Moral there some- 
 where, too, if one were energetic enough to 
 find it, which I'm not. 
 
 And now that you are going to Florence, 
 I want you to do two things for me. Go to 
 the church of the Annunziata and send up a 
 little prayer for me at that Silver Altar, and 
 maybe buy and set burning for me a candle 
 of white wax that I may have the thing I
 
 i88 Letters from G. G. 
 
 wish, which is to be well . . . and then, 
 on your way out, find the good dame who sits 
 under the portico with her basket, buy of her 
 a rosemary bun, or two, and then go to the 
 Cave o' the Cats. 
 
 Ignorance and Poor Old One are of course 
 long turned to dust, but I dare be sworn there 
 are cats of the same stamp crawling in their 
 stead. 
 
 Give them for me a memorial crumb. 
 
 G. G. IN THE WHITE MOUNTAINS, R. F., 
 SWITZERLAND. 
 
 Spring. 
 
 So you have beheld Montoro in its sweet 
 spring dress of roses and irises and white 
 lilies. 
 
 Yes, it is something to be grateful to me 
 for. One must ever feel richer for having 
 the memory of it stored away among one's 
 possessions. I feel that I own nothing more 
 than I do that place. I incorporated it into 
 my system the last time I was there, I can feel
 
 Letters from G. G. 189 
 
 every aspect of it; none perhaps more than 
 the deserted round garden at the upper end of 
 the green, and the balustrade under the statue 
 of Diana at the foot of it, leaning against which 
 I have seen the Beautiful City by every light 
 of night and day. But then . . . when 
 you've said that, you feel you must go on and 
 enumerate every corner of the place, every 
 inch of which is inexpressibly beautiful. 
 
 I'm glad you saw Lady Grey, and glad you 
 realized her wonderfulness. 
 
 Yes, I have been horribly ill, but I'm better 
 now, and I think I'm going to be well, tho' 
 even now I find it difficult to imagine it, I was 
 so sure that no one could ever go through 
 what I did, and come out of it into life and 
 light and health again. 
 
 I can't look upon this illness as a loss of 
 time, but merely a time of trial, and I have 
 learned things and seen things which I can 
 never forget. 
 
 After the blackest hour of my life, I saw 
 what eyes of flesh do not see, I heard what
 
 190 Letters from G. G. 
 
 cars do not hear. I know what the people 
 of old underwent who saw; I know that it 
 requires a combination of the excess of phys- 
 ical fatigue, with the extremest mental alert- 
 ness and activity. One stands in an untrod- 
 den wilderness, away from every one, from all 
 one has ever known before, and then one sees, 
 hears, learns and knows things to which one 
 has been blind and deaf; in a blinding flash 
 one learns the meaning of everything; and I 
 don't think the radiance of it can ever quite 
 desert one. 
 
 As the weeks go by, and I rub up against 
 the world and people again, I feel it fading 
 and slipping from me, but even so, R. F., 
 everything is so changed you don't know! 
 It was always beautiful enough to me, but 
 now Life seems so miraculous, so truly God- 
 given, God-like, nay, so truly God's very self, 
 that to willingly kill or hurt even a blade of 
 grass or an ant is impossible. I have a feeling 
 of kinship with the very stones and elements, 
 say nothing of man and beast. We are all
 
 Letters from G. G. 191 
 
 made of precisely the same stuff, and that 
 stuff happens to be God ! 
 
 How strange it is, and yet how absurdly 
 natural and simple. 
 
 To think how lately it seemed to me that 
 existence could hold in store for me nothing 
 that would repay me for what I was suffering, 
 and now the result has been an experience 
 so beyond words wonderful, that for the sake 
 of attaining it I would go through all again; 
 and that is putting it as strongly as I can. 
 
 "Who found for you the waters that soothed your 
 
 heart-break first?" 
 "Oh, who but these, my Sorrow, my Hunger, and 
 
 my Thirst." 
 "Who made your eyes the wiser to hail the farthest 
 
 star?" 
 "Who but my Dark I thanked not, my Dark where 
 
 no stars are." 
 
 I wonder has it ever come to you, the plain, 
 undiluted Genius that has gone to the invent- 
 ing of every last trifling detail in the creation 
 of this wonderful, wonderful beautiful world.
 
 192 Letters from G. G. 
 
 and of our wonderful beautiful selves who are 
 all one and indivisibly He? When you re- 
 flect that nothing is chance, that every atom 
 has had to be thought out and executed and 
 then look at the effects produced! It makes 
 me gasp with delight to think of the Poet and 
 the Artist and the Inventor and the Mechanic 
 that went to the making of it all! Think of 
 inventing the smell of sweet peas and wet 
 earth. Look at that inspired aspen-tree, rip- 
 pling and winking like water in the sun, flick- 
 ering like flame, sounding like an elfin caval- 
 cade and look at that fountain of green 
 spray that calls itself an elm ! You hear peo- 
 ple talk about Japanese art ... Just look, 
 look at the grasses balancing on the edge of 
 the road, with their lovely shadows at their 
 feet! 
 
 Isn't it strange, the great meaning things 
 can come to have for us which, as a matter of 
 fact, do not exist at all? I don't know 
 whether I can explain what I mean, but take. 
 for example the mountains.
 
 Letters from G. G. 193 
 
 I can look up, as I write, and see them over 
 there, and as you read you will look up and 
 see those others before you. They are 'way 
 off in the horizon, they stand so sweet and dim 
 and pensive, one coherent silhouette from top 
 to foot, one lovely blot of color, and the ten- 
 der message they send us across space is so 
 calm, so full of assurance and peace, their 
 charm is so mystic, so subtle, themselves are 
 so adorably grave and we love them. 
 
 But that is not the mountain at all ! The 
 real mountain is the one we climb. It has its 
 charm, but it is totally other than that other! 
 The charm of detail, of cool shade and danc- 
 ing lights, and cloud shadows, winding paths 
 and grateful brooks, of solidity, reliability, and 
 then there are open faces of rock, and rusty 
 patches of hewn or burnt forest, blemishes 
 unseen in the distance, yet not unlovable. 
 
 And the stars! What we see are not the 
 stars at all ! They are great, awful cataclys- 
 mic things, whirling and sizzling away; and 
 what we think them is the very essence of re-
 
 194 Letters from G. G. 
 
 pose and imperturbability, "still steadfast, 
 still unchangeable," and we love what the dis- 
 tance makes them seem, which is not in the 
 least what they are at close range. 
 
 And you and I, at our immeasurable dis- 
 tance? There it is! We cherish an aspect 
 which certainly is there for us, is perhaps in 
 some mysterious way as real as any other, but 
 we can't say we love the real thing, can we? 
 because we don't know the real thing. The 
 real thing may be just as worthy to be loved, 
 but it certainly is different from that to which 
 we have pinned our affection. 
 
 You know so absurdly little of me, really! 
 You only know what I have chosen, selected 
 to tell you. I have a notion that I know you 
 much better, for you are une dme sans detours 
 and I fear I am not. 
 
 G. G., NEW LONDON, R. R, CALIFORNIA 
 
 Summer. 
 
 Has it been unkind, dear, letting all these 
 months go by without sending you a single
 
 Letters from G. G. 195 
 
 word? I have no excuse to offer. I couldn't 
 write, that was all. I had no answer for your 
 unanswerable letters from California, and 
 silence seemed the only reception I could give 
 them. I had nothing to say. I am not sure 
 now that I know what to say, but suddenly, I 
 feel that I can write you, where before I 
 couldn't. 
 
 If you remember at all the little tale that I 
 once told you concerning a certain Sceptic, 
 you will realize that I am not likely to be dis- 
 proportionately impressed by avowals of undy- 
 ing, exclusive devotion and faith and all the 
 rest of it. 
 
 This seems to carry with it a tone of sever- 
 ity which I am far from feeling or wishing to 
 assume. I think, however, that your attitude 
 puts me rather on the defensive. 
 
 Do you remember the night before you left 
 Paris years ago ? Do you remember how often 
 in the course of the evening you said and re- 
 peated and repeated again: "You don't know 
 how I shall miss you!" "You have no idea
 
 196 Letters from G. G. 
 
 how I am going to miss you !" and finally, al- 
 most exasperated, "But you don't in the least 
 seem to realize how dreadfully I'm going to 
 miss you!" You nearly made a grievance of 
 it that in those few days I should have suc- 
 ceeded in leaving a scratch upon your glassy 
 surface! You came near taking me to task. 
 
 And now you speak (I say now, it was 
 months ago, of course) of the Prince in the 
 Arabian Nights who sickened for love of the 
 Princess's portrait, and you say that you have 
 fallen in love with my portrait of myself, by 
 which you seem to make me responsible. My 
 Portrait of Myself. Have I written you a por- 
 trait of myself? I can't help wishing, R. F.,' 
 that I could see it. What a funny muscau 
 chiffoune I must have given myself! Incoher- 
 ent, contradictory, illogical, you surely aren't 
 going to put the blame on me if you have fallen 
 in love with anything so ornery and no ac- 
 count and po' white as G. G.? 
 
 I really think it is / who should feel injured. 
 We were playing such a nice little game ! And
 
 Letters from G. G. 197 
 
 it wasn't in the game, you know, that we 
 should become people it was all to be pen, 
 ink, and paper ! I warned you time and time 
 again that I would never "materialize." 
 
 And now, R. F., seriously there is just one 
 thing in your letter that you are not permitted 
 to say . . . that I won't have! and that 
 is your grand finale, your trump card, your 
 thunderous statement: 
 
 "You have made all other women in the 
 world forever impossible for me!" 
 
 My dear, dear child! How excruciatingly 
 funny that is going to look to you some day, 
 and if I'm any sort of a Prophet that day is 
 close at hand ! 
 
 No, dear Boy, there is a special name for 
 people, who being impossible themselves, 
 make other things and people impossible, and 
 I do assure you, that's not the kind of a dog 
 lam! 
 
 And now please, please, dear, let's forget 
 all about it. Write me write me soon and 
 tell me all about yourself.
 
 198 Letters from G. G. 
 
 You see where I am I am visiting dear 
 friends having a glorious time. There is 
 the loveliest yacht, a racer, a magnificent 
 creature that wins cups and things ; and a new 
 red devil car, and lots of horses and traps, and 
 myriad books, and the loveliest house, with a 
 Hall in it that is the most satisfactory room 
 I've ever seen in America, and such a garden ! 
 I'm sitting in an arbor now, smothered in 
 crimson rambler, so vivid it looks incandescent 
 like live coals, as if it would burn my hand if 
 I touched it and outside I can see great 
 patches of cool Japanese iris and the sea be- 
 yond. 
 
 Best of all are the people, my beloved and 
 wonderful hostess, and my fascinating and 
 wonderful host. 
 
 I went to see the Harvard- Yale boat race 
 the other day, saw it from the deck of the 
 most splendid yacht, a regular ocean liner a 
 yacht fit to go round the world in. I didn't 
 know how greatly I cared about the outcome. 
 I supposed myself quite indifferent, until sud-
 
 Letters from G. G. 199 
 
 denly it came to me that it really wouldn't be 
 fair were Yale to win. It had won so often ! 
 and I had never seen one of those races, and 
 now that I was there to see why, of course 
 Harvard must win ! And when the boats hove 
 in sight with Harvard in the lead, I yelled my- 
 self voiceless and felt tears rush down my 
 face, emotion, joy, gratitude gratitude as 
 great as if the victory had been planned solely 
 for my small private gratification. 
 
 It made me no less sorry for the crew of 
 Yale boys sculling up the "backway" after- 
 wards, with one lying unconscious in the bot- 
 tom of the boat, while the Harvard boys pulled 
 up the front way over the course to the toot- 
 ing of whistles and sirens, and cheering of 
 the crowds and braying of bands. 
 
 But somehow it seemed so right and fit, 
 that Harvard should have its taste of victory. 
 
 The evil day of my getting back into har- 
 ness has been put off and off I have spent 
 months with these dear people, and when the 
 time comes for work, and struggle again I
 
 200 Letters from G. G. 
 
 shall be a giant refreshed by all these days 
 of luxurious care-free idleness. 
 
 Nerves are slow things to mend. I thought 
 I was well long ago, but I soon found how little 
 reserve strength I had all the reservoirs 
 and pools were exhausted, drained dry, and it 
 needed this long, long lapse of loafing to give 
 them time to slowly filter full again, and now 
 I feel as if nothing would ever tire me in this 
 world. I have hours, days, weeks at a time 
 of walking about two feet above the ground, 
 treading on a current of sparkling air, when 
 I feel so full of vigor and power that I am 
 convinced that were I to lay the flat of my 
 hand against the Times Building and push 
 it must topple over. When I feel there is no 
 miracle so amazing it could not easily be per- 
 formed ; when I am permeated, saturated with 
 the feeling: All's well! 
 
 I could not write you so, dear Friend, were 
 I not sure that all's well with you write and 
 tell me just how well. I wish you were here
 
 Letters from G. G. 201 
 
 to tell me ! I am going to a ball to-night. If 
 you were here we would dance and dance and 
 dance together to the tune of our vast con- 
 tent. 
 
 I wonder what you are doing this very day. 
 What are you seeing, feeling, saying? It is so 
 long since I heard from you! It is startling 
 sometimes to remember that tho' I never see 
 you and tho' I may not have thought of you, 
 even, for a "considerable spell" yet you are 
 going on just the same like .Niagara and 
 Athens, and the Nile and the North Pole a 
 continuous performance and I not in the 
 audience ! Don't you sometimes resent it, 
 too? Realizing that people are living their 
 lives, having their laughs and their bits of tri- 
 umphs and their heartaches and you with no 
 part in them not in it ! 
 
 And so I wonder on this lazy, hot, drowsy 
 afternoon, just what is uppermost in your 
 mind, of whom you are thinking oftenest, 
 what is interesting you most nowadays ? Your
 
 2O2 Letters from G. G. 
 
 last letters notwithstanding, I permit myself 
 the liberty of doubting that it is // 
 
 G. G. 
 
 Telegram. 
 G. G. TO R. F. 
 
 I knew it knew it knew it. Felt it in the 
 marrow of my bones. Oh, I'm so glad so 
 happy, and, my best Friend, I have so much 
 to tell you myself, seems like I'd burst. 
 
 G. G., LENOX, R. F., CALIFORNIA. 
 
 Summer. 
 
 What a dear, funny world it is, and what a 
 dear, funny Boy ! When I read your letter 
 I leaned back and laughed and laughed and 
 laughed, and then I grinned for the rest of 
 the day. I'm still grinning! I'm grinning the 
 grin that won't come off. There are so many 
 reasons for it that if one or two or ten were to 
 fail, there would still be enough left to keep 
 me grinning until my skull turns to mould. 
 
 Oh, Guinea, dear, dear Guinea, I'm so glad
 
 Letters from G. G. 203 
 
 for you! and I'm so happy on my own hook 
 that: 
 
 ' And who has been happiest? Oh I think it is I 
 I think no one was ever happier than I." 
 
 I don't know where to begin, at your end of 
 it, or my own. I'll be polite. I'll attend to 
 your story first mine will keep. 
 
 The opening of your letter was the most de- 
 licious piece of writing I ever read! You 
 stated that you wanted to write, and you 
 wanted to write; that you had before shame- 
 lessly covered reams of paper with stuff that 
 was of no moment whatever and now here 
 you had some real news to tell me and you 
 couldn't bring yourself to tell it, because you 
 didn't know how to make it fit on to your last 
 letter, the letter that ended in such a blaze 
 of glory ! 
 
 Oh, dearest Boy, why should you have 
 wanted it to fit! Why should anything ever 
 fit except my wedding clothes ! Have you
 
 204 Letters from G. G. 
 
 yet to learn that nothing follows because of 
 anything else ; and that the man who steals 
 pennies out of a blind man's dog's cup may in 
 the next hour give his life to save that dog's ? 
 
 Besides to my idea it did fit! Given 
 that a man in March ends a very spirited and 
 highly colored letter with a crl dc cccur like: 
 "You have made all other women forever im- 
 possible for me," of course the inevitable next 
 step is that in May he gains the consent of 
 the "prettiest girl in California" to be his! 
 
 However, I forbid you to call anything that 
 I've ever written you cynical. Don't you dare 
 say cynical to me! If there, was raillerie in 
 my last letter to you, Dearie Boy, the raillerie 
 was so gentle as to be positively tender. And 
 do you say cynical to me ? 
 
 Goto! Goto! 
 
 And now to the point. I'm simply dc- 
 lighted! Nothing could be nicer than your 
 falling in love (seriously in love, this time, 
 you know) with that Girlorother I've been 
 telling you about for so long-, and getting mar-
 
 Letters from G. G. 205 
 
 ried. Nothing could be nicer except my do- 
 ing the same but hold on that comes later. 
 It's so hard to wait to tell you, Guinea ! 
 
 Well haven't I been telling you this fifty 
 years that I longed to see you carried away 
 by art enthusiasm a passion, that should 
 sweep you off your feet, and make you stand 
 on your head, and turn handsprings, or do 
 something spontaneous and HOT! 
 
 Well there now it has come to pass. 
 Bless the Girl that did the trick! I wish I 
 could see her ! and yet why ? Je la vois d'ici. 
 she is jolie a croquer, and fresh and young, 
 and sweet and altogether entrancing, and, now 
 don't be cross, she thinks you the wisest, 
 cleverest, most knowing man in all the Uni- 
 verse. Tell me do you write verses to her 
 wonderful eyebrows? 
 
 And you are going to work too! Oh, I 
 am glad! Actually all my best wishes for 
 your welfare coming true Love and work ! 
 and such splendid work to go and live in the 
 great ruined city, and help build it up again
 
 206 Letters from G. G. 
 
 and make it better and more beautiful than 
 before. That's a Man's work ! I heave a 
 great sigh of satisfaction whenever I have time 
 to think of it. 
 
 There is just one wee sma' point of pain in 
 it all for me Is your being a married gentle- 
 man going to make it that I shall know you 
 no more? Shall I hear no more from you? 
 Shall you never again be inspired to write me 
 just what you truthfully think about things? 
 Will the Lovely Fair look askance upon your 
 fat letters and mine? She would be so more 
 than welcome to see either if she cared to 
 and then tho' this she would never guess, or 
 believe if she were told you are probably 
 really just a grain a nicer person for your five 
 years' course in Polite Correspondence than 
 you would have been without. 
 
 I don't want to lose my Friend. Were I 
 to misquote the Book, I might say that there 
 are men for all things: Men with whom to 
 talk, to walk, to read, to laugh ; men to eat 
 with, to drink with, to dance with, to flirt
 
 Letters from G. G. 207 
 
 with; men to hate, and men to love; and A 
 MAN yes Guinea there is A MAN to 
 marry ; so also there is a man to write to and 
 that's you! 
 
 And am I going to lose you ? 
 
 And now I've been so long talking about 
 you, that I haven't the time to do justice to 
 writing about what's been doing around these 
 parts. But it will keep ; and I enjoy keep- 
 ing you guessing for a day or two longer, tho' 
 I scarce can wait to tell you ! 
 
 Good-night. G. G. 
 
 G. G v BAR HARBOR, R. F. AT HOME. 
 
 Summer. 
 
 Thanks for your telegram, Guinea ! It was 
 even sweller than mine. But you are 'way 
 ahead of the times that is you are in a 
 sense. You are congratulating me. when I'm 
 not yet engaged! Oh, I know no modest 
 maiden talks about her trousseau or the man 
 she's going to marry until the Great Question 
 has been asked and answered. And I don't
 
 208 Letters from G. G. 
 
 talk about it. I don't breathe it to any one 
 but you and you don't count you dear old 
 thing ! 
 
 Now let me tell you all about it! 
 
 I wrote you on the very day, the Eventful 
 Day, on the day of the ball, didn't I ? It was 
 funny how after so many moons of putting off 
 writing you, I suddenly felt that I could with 
 perfect ease and security say anything to you. 
 It was as if coming events had cast their light 
 before and I could see ; I had a sort of sub- 
 conscious sense that you had settled your 
 affairs in so satisfactory a form that I could 
 be quite at ease with you again. 
 
 Well then we went to the ball. It was in 
 the house of friends in New London, a re- 
 markable house! It has a music room sixty 
 by eighty feet large and everything in propor- 
 tion, including the heartiness of the hosts. We 
 were rather late arriving, we had lingered on 
 and on over dinner, and had sat out in the rose 
 garden, rather hating the thought of dancing,
 
 Letters from G. G. 209 
 
 and the idea of going indoors seemed a good 
 one to put off. 
 
 As we stepped into the room where they 
 were dancing, my eyes, Guinea, lit on him 
 across the room. Yes on him, and I stopped 
 short as if I'd had a galvanic shock, whatever 
 that is ; I reached out my hand to steady my- 
 self, I suddenly felt light-headed and wobbly 
 in the knees, and I said in a sort of somnam- 
 bulistic voice : "Who is that? I think I never 
 saw a man before !" 
 
 Well at that moment the Gods appeared, 
 and all the Half -gods go-ed. And from that 
 moment there has existed nothing but he. 
 
 I wish I could tell you anything that would 
 sound a bit like what it was like, but words are 
 the very deuce when you really want them to 
 mean anything. I can think of nothing but 
 the meeting of the Tragic Comedians to match 
 it. Forgive me, but I can call up no more 
 modest analogy. It was the Miracle of Mir- 
 acles, electric dazzling instantaneous. 
 
 Oh, Romney ! he is so wonderful, so right !
 
 2io Letters from G. G. 
 
 And the marvel of finding him ! I had always 
 known he must be somewhere, and that some 
 time I must find him. Yet times I feared I 
 never should; times I used to say to myself: 
 "Why do I feel so sad and so forlorn? Be- 
 cause the one I love is not yet born?" or else 
 I feared he had lived a thousand years ago. 
 There have been so many, so many, who have 
 passed into my life and out again, and I have 
 sometimes wondered, "Is this he? or if it is 
 not maybe he'll do, faute de mieuxf but I 
 couldn't, couldn't be satisfied, and I knew 
 that I should know on the instant when he 
 really came, and that he must know also. 
 And, Romney so it was so it is ! Isn't it 
 wonderful wonderful wonderful ! 
 
 Don't think me gone stark staring mad. It 
 only seems as if I had a great sunrise going 
 on inside of me all the time. 
 
 The strange part is that after that first night 
 and after one marvelous day spent on the 
 water a day never to be matched what do 
 you think! I got so scared, I had such a plain
 
 Letters from G. G. 211 
 
 case of panic, I could stand no more. It was 
 all so overwhelming and so swift. What did 
 I do? Incontinentally tied I I made them 
 take me off in the motor. We'd been plan- 
 ning a trip of a week or two. 
 
 What a journey it has been! I am in a 
 trance. 
 
 I reckon you'll think me crazy, but it's Gos- 
 pel true that tho' I know of course that 
 this fall in New York . . . yet really 
 I don't care if I never see him again, for he is 
 mine, whether he knows it or not. and I am his, 
 whether he wants me or not, and oh best of 
 all He is! That is the thing that really mat- 
 ters HE is ! and I have seer, him, and he is all 
 that I could have pictured, and so much more 
 which I never should have had the imagina- 
 tion to imagine, splendid and noble, and kind 
 and true and strong and sincere, and with a 
 charm oh, but a charm of speech and man- 
 ner! 
 
 Now you will think: "Of course, she sees
 
 212 Letters from G. G. 
 
 through rose-colored goggles, but Love was 
 'ever blind !" 
 
 You are mistaken, me lad! Love is not 
 blind. Love is the most sensitively critical 
 thing in the world, and I the most clear- 
 sighted critic. 
 
 You ought to be able to see from the long 
 fiction we have kept up together for so long 
 just how it is with me. Pleiad has been the 
 treasure of my life. I addressed him through 
 you, because in a sense, you never existed for 
 me at all ! Don't misunderstand, R. F. you, 
 the man in Paris, existed as the memory of an 
 acquaintance, and as a handwriting utterly 
 impersonal, and because of that I could invest 
 you with all the qualities I required in Pleiad, 
 since not being there to gainsay or fall short 
 of them, you could not entirely "scatter the 
 vision forever." When at one time and an- 
 other you did fall short I spared not to scold 
 you roundly did I you poor dear! 
 
 I have loved how I have loved, not you, 
 R. F., but him Pleiad, with all my soul and
 
 Letters from G. G. 213 
 
 being. This is no news to you you knew it. 
 The fiction we began in laughter has led me to 
 my great happiness to-day. At the crucial 
 moment Pleiad saved me, and for that all my 
 life I must be in your debt. He made me 
 pause and wait the Star Lover saved me, and 
 now the Man has come. 
 
 Isn't it beautiful that the case fits the other 
 way about, too? though how it happens to is 
 more than I can fathom. For there's only one 
 of him, and there are so many of me the 
 world over, and it is such a faded, dull com- 
 monplace me ! 
 
 Do you wonder that I've gone back to my 
 old tricks of not sleeping ? Why sleep ? How 
 should I wish to sleep with such wonders to 
 think about? I am so full of joy I almost 
 wish I might die to-night. Now I know you 
 think me gone dotty! 
 
 I have always wanted to find my own. I 
 have not wanted to wander through space and 
 eternity a misfit and now that I've found him 
 and he has found me, he might even go so far
 
 214 Letters from G. G. 
 
 as to marry some one else if he chose, and it 
 wouldn't matter. What happened within the 
 first five seconds or our meeting was final 
 complete. 
 
 Laugh now laugh all you like! But you 
 won't laugh you are too happy yourself to 
 mock at my happiness, you are too divinely 
 mad yourself to jeer at my madness. 
 
 Dear Boy among other lovely things, is 
 it not nice that our each having found our 
 True Love, our each having given our heart to 
 Another, has brought us only the closer to- 
 gether ? 
 
 Good-night. G. G. 
 
 G. G. AT HOME, R. F. AT HOME. 
 
 Summer. 
 
 After the motor trip I didn't go back to 
 New London, as you see I came home. I've 
 been here a little over a month, and in that 
 time, Guiuea, what had to be had to be. 
 
 He couldn't very well fly about the coun- 
 try in hot pursuit of our automobile, that
 
 Letters from G. G. 215 
 
 would have bordered upon the absurd, but 
 when he heard that I had come home, he came 
 here. He could only stay week ends, but then 
 he went away and came again, and then he 
 came again, . . . and he will keep on 
 coming, Guinea, until I go back to New York 
 for it is all settled. 
 
 Thanks for your dear, good letter. It did 
 me good to hear you talk in that hearty major 
 key you who have always had a melancholy 
 devil lurking in the background. You sound 
 so gorgeously, healthily happy that I love your 
 girl for it, and am her friend forever ! I feel 
 that I know her well from your portrait of 
 her. 
 
 You want to hear all about him ? How can 
 I tell you? Anything said about him would 
 make him sound just like the average man, 
 and he isn't! He's the only man in the world. 
 
 What does he look like? He is dark, of 
 course. Your girl is dark, they had to be 
 since you and I are such towheads. He is all 
 dark, and his eyes are placid as a cow's at
 
 216 Letters from G. G. 
 
 times, sometimes they are penetrated with a 
 smile that seems to come bubbling up from 
 fathomless depths, and at times I can call them 
 nothing short of turbulent, fiery brown with 
 purple lightnings, and if the eyes are win- 
 dows of the soul, his tell the whole story. He 
 is big, big as you are, unless he is bigger, and 
 he makes me feel like a canary bird perching 
 on his big fist. He is the sanest person living, 
 and what is sanity but the combination of tre- 
 mendous passions under superb control? He 
 is distinguished as a European crowned head, 
 or would be, but that they all look so common 
 beside him. He gives one the sense of enor- 
 mous power combined with boundless gentle- 
 ness and kindliness and warmth of heart and 
 good nature and humor. 
 
 What's his business? I'm obliged to con- 
 fess he has none! But that doesn't mean 
 that he's an Idle Rich ! He's the busiest man 
 in the country except maybe our busy Presi- 
 dent. He is kept somewhat employed look- 
 ing after the things he owns, but his interest
 
 Letters from G. G. 217 
 
 is in the things that need straightening out. 
 He has a great gift for straightening the 
 crooked and pulling down the rotten and 
 raising the fallen. I suppose he might be said 
 to have a hand in politics, and he will 
 have more and more. He's the sort of man 
 who ought to, whose great interest lies not in 
 private concerns and little specialties, but in 
 People and action and great big public con- 
 siderations. 
 
 But I can't tell you about him. You'll have 
 to see him for yourself. One can't describe 
 personality, at least / can't, and his long, 
 strong suit is that he's the most lovable thing 
 ever created, and the most human. He's a 
 giant and he's a tiny child ; a good child, and 
 sometimes he's a bad child ; a king who knows 
 equally well how to rule and how to serve. He 
 is a large, a generous, person in every sense. 
 Generous and charitable materially, generous 
 and charitable in judgment. 
 
 I must tell you something : he is not Pleiad ! 
 Emphatically he is not. Pleiad was a poet
 
 2i 8 Letters from G. G. 
 
 and a dreamer and an artist, a star, an angel, 
 a saint; Pleiad was a phantom knight. A 
 knight in armor with the moonlight shining 
 on it. Pleiad was an ideal and to him all 
 praise and thanks ; he served his purpose until 
 the Man came and the man's name is John ! 
 
 G. G., B'WAY, R. F., CALIFORNIA. 
 
 Autumn. 
 
 Like Diogenes, I have my little lantern 
 and I'm ransacking New York, not to find an 
 honest man I've found him, but what seems 
 much more difficult, to spot out where are the 
 Happy People. Where do they hide them- 
 selves? Occasionally I see a woman who 
 looks fairly contented comfortable and fat; 
 and sometimes a man who has dined looks 
 enormously entertained but where are the 
 people who are as happy as I am? It can't 
 be that I'm the only one in this town? 
 
 Where are those whose clothes with diffi- 
 culty keep them from exploding from that in- 
 ward ferment of delight? Where is the Boy
 
 Letters from G. G. 219 
 
 whose Girl said "Yes" last night? Where is 
 the Girl whose Dad finally gave his consent 
 this morning? Where is the Man whose Son 
 was successfully born in the small hours? 
 Where are they upon whom rests the Peace of 
 God ? Where is the Woman whose Mother is 
 getting well ? Where are those who after the 
 pinch of poverty and pain have sudden re- 
 lease? Where are they who have done good 
 work, and given good measure, and made 
 great sacrifices, and been good and faithful 
 servants ? 
 
 I want to see in the face and eyes of my 
 neighbor some reflection of the light within. 
 I can't believe he is as dark as his surface in- 
 dicates. Is it that he studiously applies him- 
 self to erasing from his features any tell-tale 
 trace of the glow? I scan face after face in 
 the streets, in the shops, everywhere, and I 
 cannot find the Happy Ones! 
 
 And I so wish they were all as happy as I ! 
 
 Don't you think you would know if you saw 
 me? Don't you think if you saw me buzzing
 
 22O Letters from G. G. 
 
 about buying all my pretty, pretty, pretty 
 things, or if you saw me stitching and hem- 
 ming on them that you'd say to yourself: 
 "There goes the happiest woman that ever 
 breathed the air of Heaven !" Don't you think 
 if you saw me in Church trying to make my- 
 self not too grotesquely unworthy to receive 
 such a shower of good things, and singing 
 praises out of a humble but not the least bit 
 contrite heart, don't you think you'd catch a 
 wafture of my consecrated crowning mood ? 
 
 Don't think, though, Guinea, that I'm all 
 the time in carolling vein that that is all 
 there is to it. I have my awed and awful 
 moments, my moments of feeling myself go 
 pale. . . . Suppose I were unable to 
 make him happy ! 
 
 I say to myself sometimes : Maybe this is all 
 nothing but a wonderful dream. Maybe this 
 is what every woman experiences, and after- 
 wards even after happiness and security 
 that match mine come tragedies and dis- 
 illusion and soul-sickening despair !
 
 Letters from G. G. 221 
 
 Well, come what come may, I am safe ! At 
 this crisis as in all others, I lie in the hollow of 
 the Great Hand that will not let me fall, or 
 entirely crush me, and will not turn my cup 
 to one of unmixed gall. Whatever comes 
 hereafter, I have stood on the Summit of the 
 Mountain, and I have walked through the 
 Gates of Sunrise. 
 
 Were I to-day to be assured that all that lies 
 hidden in to-morrow would be storm and ship- 
 wreck, I would go on, I could not go back, for 
 now I realize that it is not for the sake of con- 
 tinuing my own great joy that I am following 
 in the path that looks all lined with rose petals. 
 I must go on because I must, no matter what 
 the path leads to. 
 
 I know that all cannot forever be at this 
 white heat of ecstasy for him and for me I 
 know ... I know that gray days, black 
 days, stormy days, must come, and it is more 
 for their sake than for the golden ones that I 
 want to be with him. I want to be with him 
 in his successes, in his triumphs, in his great
 
 222 Letters from G. G. 
 
 hours, but how much more I must be with him 
 in the inevitable hours of despondency and 
 disgust, in the possible hours of failure. I 
 want to be with him as he grows old, to grow 
 old along with him. How could I bear an- 
 other to be there in my place if he were ill 
 and sad ? His mother is the only one I should 
 not be jealous of and she is no longer here 
 and I want to be mother and sister and friend, 
 as well as his love and his wife. 
 
 Good-by, dear R. F. ; you will be married 
 only a few days after this reaches you. You 
 in the season of Falling Leaves, and I at 
 Blossoming Lilac Time. Your church is to be 
 gorgeous with crimson and golden autumn 
 boughs ? Mine will be sweet with purple and 
 white perfume. 
 
 You are coming to New York on your 
 honeymoon ? Isn't it delightful ! (We are 
 going to Italy, of course to Venice.) When 
 you come I shall meet your Mary, I want so 
 to see her and to love her, and you must know
 
 Letters from G. G. 223 
 
 and like my man! You can't help it, you 
 know! 
 
 Each other we shall dodge and hide from. 
 We'll keep up the game to the end won't we ? 
 though maybe we'll go so far as to have chats 
 over the telephone? 
 
 Good-by good-by good-by. 
 
 God have you in His care. He has ! 
 
 God keep you. He will ! 
 
 God love you. He does !
 
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