"Oh, read the letter, Mary. You make me tired."
"Tired? Letter, you call it," cried the excited woman. "I tell you it's—it's a lot of gibberish that no sane son of ours ever wrote. Oh! you're as bad as those men at the bureau. I made them read it, and—and they said he was a—bright boy. Bright, indeed! You listen to this and you can judge for yourself—if you've any sense at all."
"DEAREST MUM:
"I haven't written you in weeks, which should tell you that I am quite up to the average in my sense of filial duty. It should also tell you that I hope I am prospering both in health and in worldly matters. I say 'hope' because nothing much seems certain in this world except the perfidy of human nature. It has been said that disappointment is responsible for all the hope in the world, but I'd like to say right here that that's just a sort of weak play on words which don't do justice to the meanest intelligence. I am full of hope and haven't yet been disappointed. Not even in my conviction that human nature has some good points, but bad points predominate, which makes you feel you'd, generally speaking, like to kick it plenty.
"While I'm on the subject of human nature it would be wrong not to discriminate between male and female human nature. Male can be dismissed under one plain heading: 'Self'—a heading which embraces every unpleasant feature in life, from extreme moral rectitude, with its various branches of self-complacency, down to chewing tobacco, to me a symbol of all that is criminally filthy in life. Female human nature comes under a similar heading, only, in a woman's case, 'Self' is a combination of the two personalities, male and female. You see, 'Self,' in female human nature, is not a complete proposition in itself. Before it becomes complete there must be a man in the case, even if he be a disgrace to his sex. I will explain. You couldn't entertain any feeling or purpose without the old Dad coming into your focus. But with man it's different. The only reason a woman comes into his life at all is so that he can kick her out of it if she don't do just as he says and wants. I guess this sounds better to me writing from here than maybe it will to you in your parlor in New York. But it's easier to say things when you feel yourself shorn of the artificialities of life.
"This is merely preliminary, leading up to two pieces of news I have to hand to you. The first is, I have discovered that woman is the greatest proposition inspired by a creative Providence for the delight of man, but in business, unless specially trained, she's liable to fall even below the surface scum which includes the lesser grade of biped called 'man.' The second is that man, generally, is a pretty disgusting brute, and I allow he deserves all he gets in life, even to lynching. Understand I am speaking generally, as a looker-on, whose eyes are no longer blinded by the glamour of wealth in a big city and the comforts of a luxurious home.
"I feel I've got to say right here that to me, apart from the foregoing observations, woman is just the most wonderful thing in all this wonderful world. Her perfections and graces are just sublime; her understanding of man is so sympathetic that it don't seem to me she'd need more than two guesses to locate how many dollars he'd got in his pocket or the quality of the brain oozing out under his hat.
"I guess her eyes are just the dandiest things ever. Furthermore, when they happen to be hazel, they got a knack of boring holes right through you, and chasing around and finding the smallest spark of decency that may happen to be lying hidden in the general muck of a man's moral makeup. They do more than that. I'd say there never was a man in this world who, under such circumstances, happens to become aware of some such spark, but wants to start right in and fan it into a big bonfire to burn up the refuse under which it's been so long secreted. That's how he's bound to feel—anyway, at first.
"A woman's just every sort of thing a man needs around him. It don't seem a matter for worry if the sun-spots became a complete rash and its old light went out altogether. That feller would still see those wonderful eyes shining out of the darkness, giving him all the light he needed in which to play foolish and think himself all sorts of a man.
"Guess when he'd worked overtime that way and sleep set him dreaming he'd make pictures he couldn't paint in a year. There'd be every sort of peaceful delight in 'em. There'd be lambs, and children without clothes, and birds and flowers. And the lambs would bleat, and the children sing, and the birds flutter, and the flowers smell, and all the world would be full of joy. Then he'd wake up. Maybe it would be different then. You see, a man awake figures his woman needs to look like the statue of Venus, be bursting with the virtues of a first-class saint, and possess the economical inspiration of a Chinee cook.