I return Beverley's letter. Without comment, since I did not read it. You know how I love Beverley, respect him, believe in him. I have a feeling for him unlike that for any other human being, not even Ben; I look upon him as set apart and sacred because he has genius and belongs to the world.
As for his faults, those that I have not already noticed I prefer to find out for myself. I have never cared to discover any human being's failings through a third person. Instead of getting acquainted with the pardonable traits of the abused, I might really be introduced to the abominable traits of the abuser.
Once more, you think you are going to marry Beverley! I shall reserve my congratulations for the event itself.
Thank you for surrendering your claim on my friendship and society last night. Ben and I had a most satisfactory evening, and when not suffocating we murmured "I do" to our hearts' content.
Next time, should your visits clash, I'll push him out. Yet I feel in honour bound to say that this is only my present state of mind. I might weaken at the last moment—even in the Franklin Flats.
As to some things in your letter, I have long since learned not to bestow too much attention upon anything you say. You court a kind of irresponsibility in language. With your inborn and over-indulged willfulness you love to break through the actual and to revel in the imaginary. I have become rather used to this as one of your growing traits and I am therefore not surprised that in this letter you say things which, if seriously spoken, would insult your sex and would make them recoil from you—or make them wish to burn you at the stake. When you march up Fifth Avenue with your company of girls in that kind of procession, there will not be any Fifth Avenue: you will be tramping through the slums where you belong.
All this, I repeat, is merely your way—to take things out in talking. But we can make words our playthings in life's shallows until words wreck us as their playthings in life's deeps.
Still, in return for your compliments to me, which, of course, you really mean, I paid you one the other night when thinking of you quite by myself. It was this: nature seems to leave something out of each of us, but we presently discover that she perversely put it where it does not belong.
What she left out of you, my dear, was the domestic tea-kettle. There isn't even any place for one. But she made up for lack of the kettle by rather overdoing the stove!
Your discreet friend,
POLLY BOLES.