Which is a lie. My brain is not scintillantly brilliant and it ‘needs’ nothing. But the lie is agreeable to read. There is a gentle caressingness in its untruth which feels someway soothinger than any flattering fact.
And he tells me my chief attraction as an individual is my ability accurately to gauge another individual and to breathe myself graciously out to it and upon it while pretending to be immersed in my own ego.
Which is another lie. Immersed in my own ego is never a pretense with me, and I have not gauged—in the sense of weighing and measuring—another individuality except to hate it. But it is piquantly restful to hear that I am thus benign.
And he tells me that though several years have passed since he and I took leave of one another he has never forgotten that last parting because it was like the passing of a little weir-woman who brushed him lightly with her garments as she went.
Which is another lie. My association with him was in brief meetings at hectic studio tea-fights and two noisy dinners at Churchill’s, at all of which I frowned impatiently at his tiresome conversation. And his leave-taking with me consisted in his sharpening a lead-pencil—beautifully he sharpened it—for me to write a telegram with. It was not until this correspondence that we established an unreliable intimacy. But to be told I seemed a weir-woman to a hard-headed business man who could doubtless cheat a client out of four thousand dollars easily in a half-day’s maneuvering is oddly inspiriting.
And he tells me he is highly privileged to be permitted to gaze in at the mezzo-tinted windows of my soul, which are surely curtained against the passing proletariat.
Which is another lie. He has never remotely glimpsed my tired Soul in the firmly false little letters I’ve written him. As to its being a privilege if he had: it is the proletariat, it so happens, who have first chance at those windows, which are not mezzo-tinted but made of the plainest of plain glass. But the conceit tastes mellow and naïf and bromidic and appetizing to me, like cream and raspberries in July.
And he tells me the most delightful thing in the world would be to live near me and have a season of daily meetings—meetings of astral selves upon a ‘higher plane’ whereon we should exchange those flowers and fruits of the spirit which grow not from the soils but from the esoteric essences of life:—that sort of thing.
Which is another lie. No possible man (except a Poet whom I loved—or perhaps a scientist—) could find me delightful for more than two consecutive meetings—I develop something like temper—and I care for no higher planes except in airships. As for esoterics—I would fainer exchange musings anent over-shoes than over-souls. And my spirit bears in fertile earthy soil chiefly thistles from which men gather no figs. But it gives me a warmish feeling, similar to a hot-water bottle between my shoulders on a winter night, to read that picturesque palaver written to me in my slim scorn by him in his springy swivel chair.