“I am in a retrospective mood to-night, and feel like writing all sorts of things which I am afraid you won’t much like. Do you know I think that college is doing you harm! Don’t get angry at this, but sometimes I’m afraid you have repented of our boy and girl runaway match; but God knows I haven’t, and I’m glad I didn’t go to college but came out West and went to work for us both. I haven’t succeeded very brilliantly and may be the life has roughened me a bit, but I guess you can have the best there is out here, and I am still as devoted to you as in those old days of the summer before you went to that confounded (excuse me!) college, when you were just eighteen and I barely twenty-one. How interminably long four years seemed to wait then! But it was a case of getting married secretly and of waiting, or of not getting you at all. Sometimes I can hardly stand it, and I’d come back now and take you away, if I wasn’t so afraid of that blessed old father of yours—but I’m just as big a coward as I was three years ago, when I couldn’t screw up courage enough to go to him and tell him that he’d have to relinquish his pet scheme of sending his daughter to college, for she belonged to me. Whew! what a scene we’d have had! It was best to wait, I suppose.
“After all, only a year and then I can claim you! Have you changed any? I’m afraid you’re way ahead of me now. I always had an uncomfortable suspicion that you were very much my superior, and I have half fancied that perhaps you only loved me because I was so madly—so passionately in love with you. Did I over-persuade you? have you ceased to love me? Sometimes I get half sick with fear. You are all I have! But after all I feel safe enough—I know you too well not to know that you will never break your promise—even one you hate. But you know I’ll never hold you to that marriage—though it was all valid enough—if you don’t want to be held. I can simply blow my good-for-nothing brains out.
“I won’t write any more to-night. There is so much swearing and noise down in the street that I can hardly think; besides I don’t feel just like it, and lately your letters have only irritated me. But I won’t complain, for I know how generously you have acted and what brilliant prospects you have given up for my precious self!
“Devotedly yours and only yours,
A TELEPHONED TELEGRAM
WHEN Miss Eva Hungerford married Stanhope there was one young lady intensely glad of it, although it was whispered that there were also two or three who were quite the contrary. But Mrs. Renford Phillips—once Miss Violet Featherstone—had particular reasons for rejoicing, and she wrote a long letter to Miss Hungerford when she heard of the engagement, and said that she hoped “by-gones would be by-gones now, and that she was sure her friend would be a broader-minded and more perfect woman, if that were possible, now that she was going to have the additional experience of getting married.”
Miss Hungerford wrote her a most cordial reply, and the two girls, for several years slightly estranged, became again the friends they had been during the first three years of their college life.