“Anonymous letters are so futile.”
“Anything but,” I told her. “It is always a pleasant thing, at the end of the day, to feel that you have, even in a slight way, contributed to anyone’s happiness. And I’m sure the lady who dug her pen into that anonymous letter was very happy when she posted it. Glad am I, therefore, to be the unworthy instrument permitted to promote her joy!”
Virginia merely snorted. “What’s the next MS. about?”
“This is a very long poem on the War, and the writer explains that she has made all the lines run straight on in order to save paper, but doubtless I can find out where it rhymes. It begins ‘Hail, proud mother of nations who dwell in these sea-girt islands for centuries past and centuries yet to be——’”
Virginia said she’d skip the rest, please, and wasn’t there a little light fiction anywhere in the chaos before me?
“This is a story of a beautiful Russian princess who was doomed to live in a lonely castle, with no one but her aged and decrepit nurse, in the very centre of a pathless Siberian forest, hundreds of miles from everybody, until the spell should be broken——”
“What spell?” inquired Ursula.
“(I don’t know—the writer doesn’t say)—until the spell should be broken, when she would be free. She was the most exquisite vision that ever burst upon human sight. Not only were her features perfect, and her hair a rippling cascade of gold, but her dress was grace and beauty combined.”
“Then it wasn’t one of this season’s models!” ejaculated Ursula, “hence it must have been out-of-date. All the same, I’d like to know who was her dressmaker. Did they think to mention the name?”