LETTER TO AN INTIMATE FRIEND.
Fifth Avenue Hotel, New York, February —, 18—.
My dear Alice,—I ran away from Boston without saying good-by to you. Dr. Wesselhoeft predicted all sorts of horrors—hysterics, St. Vitus’s dance, nervous prostration, and I don’t know what else, if I did not at once get away from the hosts of people who drove me distracted with an incessant ringing of the door-bell from breakfast until bedtime. I was not aware that I had so many friends before. Every pupil I have ever had, every passing acquaintance even, has felt it to be his or her privilege and duty to call and congratulate me and bore me to death with their ecstasies and flatteries.
I rather liked it at first, I must confess. It was all so novel to me, and it showed some of my acquaintances in an entirely new light, which, I found, gave me an admirable opportunity for a study of character on its drollest side. Whenever I entered the reception room and found it lined with callers waiting all on tiptoe for my appearance, I really felt like a president beset by office-seekers during his first month at the White House.
But a few days of all this rather nauseated me, and I thanked my fortune that it had not come at my birth, but had allowed me to make many true and tried friends before bestowing on me what I fear will now always make me suspicious of a lack of disinterestedness in every new-comer.
However, in leaving Boston and coming to New York I fancy that I have only jumped out of the frying-pan into the fire, for letters pursue me everywhere. I devote every forenoon to reading them and dictating replies to my amanuensis. Many of them are applications for money or help of some sort, some of them outrageous, and some very pitiful indeed. I had one some days ago from a poor fellow in Vermont, who fancied himself an inventor. He had just lost his wife and two children, and implored me to “help him make a man” of the only little one left to him. His letter sounded so forlorn that it went to my heart, so I sent telegrams of inquiry about him to the postmaster and the minister in his native town. They answered my questions satisfactorily, and I sent at once for the man to come.
Such a dazed, bewildered-looking creature as he was, to be sure, when he stepped out of the carriage, which I had sent for him, and stumbled clumsily up the steps with his baby, tied up in an old red shawl, in his arms!
He told me the simple story of his life, its little ambitions and narrow outlook; of his conversion and his courtship, and of the horrors of disease and death and poverty, to which his pinched face and trembling hands bore witness. The boy was a pathetic little morsel of humanity, and his sad little mouth won my heart. I have taken charge of the child, and, please God, I will “make a man of him.” The father is quite unfit for hard work, and what to do with him I did not know, when suddenly I bethought myself of a magazine article which you loaned me some time ago, apropos of “A Universal Tinker.” The man is clever with tools, I hear, and just the one to do odd bits of mending and attending to the thousand and one things which are always getting out of order about a house. So I sent him with a letter to all my Back Bay friends, and eight of them have offered to pay him five dollars a month each, on condition that he keep everything in their establishments in repair. I have given him a chest of tools, and have found a good home for him. A widow in straitened circumstances, whom also I wish to help, but who will not accept charity, is glad to receive him and his child into her family. Really, the man seems already like another creature. He has taken on a new look of self-respect and courage that makes his commonplace, weather-beaten face fairly radiant.
This whole experience has given me intense satisfaction. I had almost made up my mind to pay no heed to these calls, which demand so much of my time and prove, at least half of them, to come from frauds and impostors. In fact, it was merely as an experiment, and chiefly to indulge my curiosity, that I heeded this case. I am now determined to have every appeal for help that seems at all deserving thoroughly investigated, and I foresee that I shall be obliged to have more than one agent to attend to it all.
I had an extraordinary experience last night, of which I must tell you, though my ears tingle yet at the thought of it. I wonder if this is a foretaste of the penalties which I am doomed to pay for the sin of being a great heiress. I had always wondered how rich women could endure to make such a display of diamonds at parties and balls as to necessitate their being dogged by private detectives everywhere. I always maintained that a woman was an idiot who would thus let herself become such a slave to her wealth. I was sure that any one who lived simply, and did not care for show, could go alone where she pleased, and have no fears; but my theories are getting sadly shaken. However, I am digressing. Now about this affair last night.