She turned to the first page carefully, remembering,
Through hedge, over gate
Straight! straight! straight! straight!
There she found a subtitle: Letters to Gorgas Levering; to be delivered into her hands on the twentieth anniversary of her birth; dictated from time to time by the heart of an old comrade and withheld from the post by his conscience. (Later note: “twentieth” amended to “eighteenth” but under stern protest of said conscience.)
The first letter was dated June 17, 1888. It was a date she knew by heart. Every year she had celebrated secretly the anniversary of the meeting at the tennis-court. She read:
“Dear Gorgas Levering: You have given me a psychological shock: you have unhinged my reason, let loose my emotions, and upset my moral apple cart! You did all that, and you know nothing about it. When you grow up—say, at twenty or twenty-one—I shall present you with this document of evidence, and if you have any sense of decency at that age you will be shocked too. No little girl of thirteen with a face like a madonna should be allowed to tuck her legs under her pinafore and impose upon a grown up man what shaves every day. (The seeming irrelevancy of these remarks is not due to lunacy—although it is yet disputed if the moon does not have something to do with it—but to a fine scientific ardor. All the facts must be recorded and in this case concealed legs is facts.)
“All my life I have stopped in the middle of experience and recorded my feelings. I say, ‘Allen Blynn, you feel this way or that way.’ This helps me to remember later; for all our lives we are stuffing and changing and forgetting our former selves. Hence I hereby solemnly affirm that if I had the courage to smash all the conventions of my civilization and put a good-sized gash into the moral code of my contemporaries, I, Allen Blynn, male, white, and a voter, would have picked you up in my arms today at the tennis-courts, hugged the daylight out of you, tossed you across my shoulders, made straight for the nearest clergyman and married you—with one hand across your mouth to prevent your squealing and the other firmly grasping your struggling legs.
“That would be kidnapping—punishable by life imprisonment. I know it. And also grand larceny. Of course it is. And something like piracy. Right! Yet, I did none of these things; sheer cowardice held my hands; but if to have murder in the heart is to be murderer, as I believe, then I stand here convicted of the desire to own you, bag and baggage, legs, and all.
“And you are thirteen years old, and I am twenty-three!
“It is shameful, isn’t it? But I am brazenly unashamed. That is the Lord’s own psychological truth!
“Your kidnapper at heart,
“Allen Blynn.”