We have talked the matter over and send you our conjoined congratulations that your engagement is broken off and your immediate peril ended. But our immediate caution is that the end of the betrothal will not necessarily mean the end of entanglement: the tempter will at once turn away from you in pursuit of another man. She will begin to weave her web about him. But if possible she will still hold you to that web by a single thread. Now, more than ever, you will need to be on your guard, if such a thing is possible to such a nature as yours.
Not until obliged will she ever let you go completely. She hath a devil—perhaps the most famous devil in all the world—the love devil. And all devils, famous or not famous, are poor quitters.
(Signed)
POLLY BOLES for Ben Doolittle.
BEN DOOLITTLE for Polly Boles.
(His handwriting; her ideas
and language.)
TILLY SNOWDEN TO DR. MARIGOLD
MY DEAR DR. MARIGOLD:
This is the third time within the past several months that I have requested you to let me have your bill for professional services. I shall not suppose that you have relied upon my willingness to remain under an obligation of this kind; nor do I like to think I have counted for so little among your many patients that you have not cared whether I paid you or not. If your motive has been kindness, I must plainly tell you that I do not desire such kindness; and if there has been no motive at all, but simply indifference, I must remind you that this indifference means disrespect and that I resent it.
The things you have indirectly done for me in other ways—the songs, the books and magazines, the flowers—these I accept with warm responsive hands and a lavish mind.
And with words not yet uttered, perhaps never to be uttered.
Yours sincerely,
TILLY SNOWDEN.
June the Seventeenth.