“But please don’t think about writing,” I said, “when you’ve anything more attractive on hand. I delight in reading letters, but I know well how tiring it is to write them.”
“It is, sometimes,” Arthur assented. “For instance, when you’re very shy of the person you have to write to.”
“Does that show itself in the letter?” Lady Muriel enquired. “Of course, when I hear any one talking—you, for instance—I can see how desperately shy he is! But can you see that in a letter?”
“Well, of course, when you hear any one talk fluently—you, for instance—you can see how desperately un-shy she is—not to say saucy! But the shyest and most intermittent talker must seem fluent in letter-writing. He may have taken half-an-hour to compose his second sentence; but there it is, close after the first!”
“Then letters don’t express all that they might express?”
“That’s merely because our system of letter-writing is incomplete. A shy writer ought to be able to show that he is so. Why shouldn’t he make pauses in writing, just as he would do in speaking? He might leave blank spaces—say half a page at a time. And a very shy girl—if there is such a thing—might write a sentence on the first sheet of her letter—then put in a couple of blank sheets—then a sentence on the fourth sheet: and so on.”
“I quite foresee that we—I mean this clever little boy and myself—” Lady Muriel said to me, evidently with the kind wish to bring me into the conversation, “—are going to become famous—of course all our inventions are common property now—for a new Code of Rules for Letter-writing! Please invent some more, little boy!”
“Well, another thing greatly needed, little girl, is some way of expressing that we don’t mean anything.”
“Explain yourself, little boy! Surely you can find no difficulty in expressing a total absence of meaning?”
“I mean that you should be able, when you don’t mean a thing to be taken seriously, to express that wish. For human nature is so constituted that whatever you write seriously is taken as a joke, and whatever you mean as a joke is taken seriously! At any rate, it is so in writing to a lady!”