At the time of Miss Dooley’s visit Mrs. Harris had been for some weeks endeavoring to buy a saddle horse. The author had looked at about twenty-five animals and was contemplating the purchase of a young and beautiful creature having every virtue and grace a horse can have.
“But,” Mrs. Harris remarked, “when I asked the man the price of this paragon he said $100!”
We could wish there were space in this book for the reproduction of some of the letters Mrs. Harris has received since she began writing. They are touching and amusing and altogether extraordinary. Her book In Search of a Husband, for instance, brought her an epistle from a young man of 27 who was in search of a wife. Though he had entered the Presbyterian ministry at 15 and had worked his way through college and the theological seminary he was “full of fun” and liked “good shows, music and baseball. I suppose the worst habit I have is smoking.” He explained naïvely: “I have visited every place of interest in North America.... With all my experience, all my studies and all my theories I ask myself again and again: Do I know what love is?”
Mrs. Harris endeavors to make some answer to all such letters but it must have been a baffling task to frame a reply to a reader whose letter began:
“Often I have noticed that in your metaphers you employ terms used in techical grammer, for instance, in your Circuit Rider’s Widow:—‘He has never risen above haveing his virtue conjugated in the subjunctive mood.’ I naturally inferred that what he did or said was contrary to fact, as that conveyed the substance of the definition of the subjunctive mood. But, you follow up with may, can, must, etc., signs of the Potential mood.”
This perplexed and perplexing inquirer went on to praise Mrs. Harris’s character drawing.
It is not her character drawing, penetrative and uncanny as that is—a man once growled: “This woman knows too much!”—that most distinguishes Mrs. Harris but her irony, her corrosive sanity! Take her plain talk on eugenics.
“During the last ten years that I have been coming to New York I have heard one subject discussed more than any other, more than art, literature, science, politics, society, religion, industry or commerce. This is ‘sex,’ and the people whom I meet are not decadent. They all harrow it, dissect it with an openness, a Tristram Shandy frankness that would imply they have no personal sense of gender, male or female.
“One very distinguished man who is interested in the problem of sex, not for, but I should say out of the working girls, said this to me:
“‘We want to give these girls the right start sexually.’ (It is what nature always gives them, by the way!) ‘We are trying to inform them of everything concerning sex. Of everything—destroy their curiosity, you know.’