Paris, February 8, 1883.
PARIS.
ERE again, after six months’ absence—six months only! How to believe that! Why, I seem to have lived cycles and cycles; seem to be not one, just one small, insignificant I, but dozens and dozens of myself. Yes, even sometimes have an enormous delusion that the little nobody who went away suffered a not-sea, but an no, not-earth—What then? Ah! I have it: tourist change into something strange, grand, glorious (it must out), goddess-like! Was ever presumption so immense and so absurd? Well, I am not responsible for it, but the experiences. Could any mortal go through such and escape the same scath?
September 2d. If good intentions were the same sort of masters that czars, emperors, the great mogul, the sublime porte, et id omne genus are, or have been—what a lot of things come under that last pathetic head—this letter would have been finished and on the way to you. But there is such a throng of hindering duties got themselves mixed up in my affairs, I really don’t know what moment I may be ruthlessly torn from the performance of what I wish to do to that I wish—still more to do! Such is woman’s—
September 3d. Just there I was torn off again after I don’t know how many feminine raps at my door and feminine heads bobbing in, and, worst of all, each of them supplied with that rabidest of all tongues, a feminine one! (Let alone a woman for a just estimate of her own sex!) Don’t that last dozen lines show “confusion worse confounded” from some cause? You have no leave to indulge in mental comment, such as, “Perhaps, my lady, that unspiritual circumstance was in your own state of mind, without any outside pressure to develop it.” And so don’t you dare. Truth is, I was in the superlative degree of calmness, collectedness, clearness, comprehensiveness, like clouds that have gathered their quota of electricity, the inevitable “next thing” being “the most brilliant display of fireworks of the season.” Any letter heretofore would have been a battery of “spent balls,” an eruption of mere dead cinders. There! that’s what you would have gotten, what you have missed, because of those hindering goddesses. “The more’s the pity.”
I glance up at that last broken sentence, “Such is woman’s—.” What was to follow, I am as much at a loss to recall as a panic-stage, I mean—struck, debutante of the boards. Oh! for “a prompter.” Can’t you come to the rescue? I will “most graciously permit.” And do you know, even now when I have double-locked (both doors and ears) myself in for this blessed privilege of communion with a “choice fellow-being,” these pages are bound to be tossed off with the lightning-like rapidity of a printing-press of the latest patent, not only with all modern improvements, but those of the future too! For somebody is coming directly to dejeuner with me, another specimen of feminine attributes, that of being equal to inviting herself, being not the least. She will claim me for the rest of the day. And that’s the way it will be.
You will see,
And alas! and alas! for this letter to thee,
If it be not writ a la electricity,
Or by some still more potent diablerie!