When we got there to-day, he deprecated my choice of locality, asking what I had brought him there for. I pointed out to him the precise mound which covered the object of his earliest affections, and gathered you these buds. Are they not a deep color for wild ones?—if their blush remains a fixed state till the post brings them to you.
Through what flower would you best like to be passed back, as regards your material atoms, into the spiritualized side of nature, when we have done with ourselves in this life? No single flower quite covers all my wants and aspirations. You and I would put our heads together underground and evolve a new flower—"carnation, lily, lily, rose"—and send it up one fine morning for scientists to dispute over and give diabolical learned names to. What an end to our cozy floral collaboration that would be!
Here endeth the epistle: the elect salutes you. This week, if the authorities permit, I shall be paying you a flying visit, with wings full of eyes,—and, I hope, healing; for I believe you are seedy, and that that is what is behind it. You notice I have not complained. Dearest, how could I! My happiness reaches to the clouds—that is, to where things are not quite clear at present. I love you no more than I ought: yet far more than I can name. Good-night and good-morning.—Your star, since you call me so.
LETTER XVIII.
Dearest: Not having had a letter from you this morning, I have read over some back ones, and find in one a bidding which I have never fulfilled, to tell you what I do all day. Was that to avoid the too great length of my telling you what I think? Yet you get more of me this way than that. What I do is every day so much the same: while what I think is always different. However, since you want a woman of action rather than of brain, here I start telling you.
I wake punctual and hungry at the sound of Nan-nan's drawing of the blinds: wait till she is gone (the old darling potters and tattles: it is her most possessive moment of me in the day, except when I sham headaches, and let her put me to bed); then I have my hand under my pillow and draw out your last for a reading that has lost count whether it is the twenty-second or the fifty-second time;—discover new beauties in it, and run to the glass to discover new beauties in myself,—find them; Benjy comes up with the post's latest, and behold, my day is begun!
Is that the sort of thing you want to know? My days are without an action worth naming: I only think swelling thoughts, and write some of them: if ever I do anything worth telling, be sure I run a pen-and-ink race to tell you. No, it is man who does things; a woman only diddles (to adapt a word of diminutive sound for the occasion), unless, good, fortunate, independent thing, she works for her own living: and that is not me!