I do wish you’d been down here this summer. I had so much to tell you. The Shoals looked very lonely with none of you in it. Was it so lovely up there in Maine that you forgot our purple mountains? I know it must be beautiful up there. I look at the map, and follow all the queer little inlets and outlets, and think how bright the water must be as it breaks on the rocks.
Well, we have had wonderful things to look at ourselves. Why, only to-day the mountains looked like gigantic plums, with rich purple bloom all over them; and the sky went to the trouble to try to match them. But I’d have enjoyed it more if I hadn’t been so poor. Not that I’m any poorer than usual, but I feel poorer because I see that at last it is “up to me” to be the money-maker. And I don’t know how to begin.
I have explained to you distinctly a number of times, my dear Carin, that when I write this way I do it to ease my feelings. I want your advice. But that is all I do want of you, except, of course, your love and sympathy. I know you ache to play fairy godmother. You’ve tried to do that many times. But I think you understand pretty well by now that that wouldn’t really help me out. I want my own fight, my own life, my own victories. Just at present I’m terribly puzzled, because I want to help Father and Mother McBirney and Jim.
I can’t write it all to Keefe, because—well because he might be able to think of a way to help me out, but not of a way to help the others. Keefe is terribly impulsive, and he will not realize how young he is. He is disgracefully young. So am I. That extreme youthfulness of ours gets in the way of some of his plans. No, I can’t write him. He isn’t sensible. Perhaps that is one of the reasons he paints so well. Did I tell you he was making rather a specialty of portraits? He sent me one of a young Jewish girl who is in his color class at the Academy of Design. He says her name is Miriam. She fits the name.
Keefe wants to come down here this winter, but I’m not going to let him. There is no reason why he should come to this one place out of all the places in the world. Let him go up to Sunset Gap to his own wonderful little sister, Mary Cecily Rowantree. He says he needs inspiration, but if anyone can give it to him, she can. You see, if he came here, he would be terribly interrupting, and I cannot and will not be interrupted. I’m going to earn the living for the family, though, as I said at the beginning, I don’t know how.
Carin, I go out and sit down beside my dear little mama’s grave and think and think. I tell her how good these people were to her, how good they have been to me ever since that terrible day when I was left alone, and I beg her if she is indeed a spirit now, who can see and understand the things that are hidden from us earth-bound ones, that she will put something into my heart to tell me what to do.
I am ready, Carin, to prove myself. Here I am with my strong body, with my heart full to bursting with gratitude and love, with my waiting hands and brain. But I need direction. You couldn’t give me that, could you, dear yellow-headed one?
Yes, I wish you might have come home this summer. It would have helped. Barbara Summers was away, too. She went home to see her people for the first time since she was married. You remember her people didn’t approve of her marriage. She had a very happy time, and all is well between her and them at last. Of Annie Laurie I see little. She is too busy. But we signal each other, she from her roof, I from the “Outlook.”
Good-bye, dear. If I write you too much, forgive me. I need to write. It comforts me. You understand all I say—all I do not say, too.
Lovingly, always,