There's a foot gone over my grave! The angel of the resurrection with his mouth pursed fast to his trumpet!—Nothing else than the gallop-a-gallop of your horse:—it sounds like a kettle boiling over!
So this goes into hiding: listens to us all the while we talk; and comes out afterwards with all its blushes stale, to be rouged up again and sent off the moment your back is turned. No, better!—to be slipped into your pocket and carried home to yourself by yourself. How, when you get to your destination and find it, you will curse yourself that you were not a speedier postman!
LETTER X.
Dearest: Did you find your letter? The quicker I post, the quicker I need to sit down and write again. The grass under love's feet never stops growing: I must make hay of it while the sun shines.
You say my metaphors make you giddy.—My clear, you, without a metaphor in your composition, do that to me! So it is not for you to complain; your curses simply fly back to roost. Where do you pigeon-hole them? In a pie? (I mean to write now until I have made you as giddy as a dancing dervish!) Your letters are much more like blackbirds: and I have a pie of them here, twenty-four at least; and when I open it they sing "Chewee, chewee, chewee!" in the most scared way!
Your last but three said most solemnly, just as if you meant it, "I hope you don't keep these miserables! Though I fill up my hollow hours with them, there is no reason why they should fill up yours." You added that I was better occupied—and here I am "better occupied" even as you bid me.
But one can jump best from a spring-board: and how could I jump as far as your arms by letter, if I had not yours to jump from?
So you see they are kept, and my disobedience of you has begun: and I find disobedience wonderfully sweet. But then, you gave me a law which you knew I should disobey:—that is the way the world began. It is not for nothing that I am a daughter of Eve.