I almost gasped. “What on earth do you mean?” I asked.
“Oh, I like you. You’ve got horse sense and see through the whole blamed show. You think I’m an ass, and I am. I have to be. I nearly starved trying to be a man, so I became an emasculated backboneless poseur to please the passionless women and the timid publishers of the United States. To please the sort of American woman who makes the success of a novelist—the faddist and the gusher—you must tickle her with the idea that she is a superior being because she has no passion and that you are creating a literature which only she can appreciate—she with a refinement and a bleached and laundried set of tastes which have made her a tyrannical middle-class enthusiast for all that is unreal and petty in art!”
“Oh!” I said, “Oh!”
“I wish I had been born an Englishman,” he pursued viciously. “To be great in English literature you’ve only to be dull; but to be great in American literature you’ve got to be a eunuch.”
Letter VII
From the Lady Helen Pole to the Countess of Edge and Ross.
Chipmunk Lake,
July 27th
Dear Polly:
MR. NUGENT, the all conquering, arranged it, Polly dear, and here I am at a far more beautiful lake than Boulder—which seems tamely pretty in comparison. It is on top of another mountain surrounded by another dense forest which grows down into the very water; but there the resemblance ends. Although not large it is almost like four different lakes, so irregular and cut up is it. From the natural terrace on which the four camps are built you look over a small body of brown water fringed with reeds and water-lilies to two mountain peninsulas which jut so far into the lake as almost to close it. The opening is called The Narrows and just beyond and across the distance runs another high sloping mountain quite cutting off further view except of far pale peaks. It is only when you are in a boat beyond The Narrows that you see the lake’s three other parts, one end closed up with great rocks and floating logs, but with the avenue of the inlet showing beyond; everywhere else, the dense silent forest, the spruce crowding to the front, the water-lilies and their pads spreading almost to the middle of the lake. There are white lilies and yellow ones and a miniature variety with so sweet and intoxicating a fragrance that in the early morning you feel as if the boat were cutting a visible passage through it. And the mountains, mountains, everywhere.
The four cottages are made of logs, three with the bark on, the other peeled and polished. Mrs. Van Worden’s is the largest and also the most homelike. We arrived rather late. Mr. N. and I, tired of the “buckboard,” had left it and walked on ahead, arriving quite noiselessly. I never shall forget how comfy Mrs. Van Worden’s living-room looked as we peered a moment through the glass door before knocking. It is a long low room with heavy beams across the dark red paper of the ceiling, and a red brick fireplace from floor to roof—in which great logs were blazing. In one corner was a graceful staircase, and on the “sealed” gold-coloured walls were many prints and photographs of sporting life in the Adirondacks. In one corner was a divan piled with cushions and draped with silk, a lamp swinging from the canopy. Against another wall was a straight divan, on which a young man was lying, reading a book. Then there were mounted deer heads and rugs and tables and at least eight rocking-chairs—I am going to take back a “rocker” as a present for you.