Practically, this seems like a good place—the process is to reduce you to a pulp and then gradually restore you to form. I am just emerging from the mash.
Do give my greetings—graduated calorically as your judgment suggests—to the many friends in your neighborhood who have forgotten me.
Devotedly, yet very sore,
F. K. L.
[September]
This is a sentimental letter from a sentimentalist to a sent—, for a sent—. It is by way of atonement, chiefly. I want to be forgiven for all the hard things I have said to you. I feel that I owe you much, at least a good word, for all the bad ones I have given you.
You are a health-giver. That's not such a bad name, is it? In fact I don't know a better. It doesn't sound sentimental, no husband would be alarmed by it, and yet it carries in it implications of gaiety and tenderness and rompishness with a touch of mysterious adoration. Altogether it is a very real large word that does not signify virtues but rather attractivenesses. Mind, I don't say that you have not the virtues—all of them, offensive and defensive, but the attractivenesses make life, don't they? And to be a health-giver is not merely to have charm. That is the spell- casting power, to be filled with witchery, to be a witch. Yes, I believe it is something like that—very much in fact, but the witchery must be balsamic, it must be radiant, it must go out in rays or circles or waves, because it can't help going out, not purposefully and selfishly, like the casting of a net—it must be balsamic and radiant, the outbreathing of pines.
Now this is a very nice name I have called you—you can put it into Latin or Greek or French and make it sound much better to the unimaginative. But you deserve it, and I hope my little girl will become one.
FRANKLIN K. LANE
Katonah, Sunday, [September 25, 1920]