NO. II. ACQUIESCENT AND ENCOURAGING.
(Miss Armstrong replies on a dull blue, canvas-textured page, over which her stub-pen wanders in fashionable negligence. She arrives on the third page at the matter in hand.)
Ah, it was very sweet, your literary love-letter. Considerable style, as you would say, but too palpably artificial. If you want to deceive this woman, my dear sir trifler, you must disguise your mockery more artfully.
Why didn't I find you at the Stanwoods'? I had Nettie send you a card. I had promised you to a dozen delightful women, "our choicest lot," who were all agog to see my supercilious and dainty sir…. Why will you always play with things? Perhaps you will say because I am not worth serious moments. You play with everything, I believe, and that is banal. Ever sincerely,
EDITH ARMSTRONG.
NO. III. EXPLANATORY AND AUTOBIOGRAPHIC.
(Eastlake has the masculine fondness for seeing himself in the right.)
I turned the Stanwoods' card down, and for your sake, or rather for the sake of your memory. I preferred to sit here and dream about you in the midst of my chimney-pots and the dull March mists rather than to run the risk of another, and perhaps fatal, impression. And so far as you are concerned your reproach is just. Do I "play with everything"? Perhaps I am afraid that it might play with me. Imagine frolicking with tigers, who might take you seriously some day, as a tidbit for afternoon tea—if you should confess that you were serious! That's the way I think of the world, or, rather, your part of it. Surely, it is a magnificent game, whose rules we learn completely just as our blood runs too slowly for active exercise. I like to break off a piece of its cake (or its rank cheese at times) and lug it away with me to my den up here for further examination. I think about it, I dream over it; yes, in a reflective fashion, I feel. It is a charming, experimental way of living.
Then, after the echo becomes faint and lifeless, or, if you prefer, the cheese too musty, I sally out once more to refresh my larder. You play also in your way, but not so intelligently (pardon me), for you deceive yourself from day to day that your particular object, your temporary mood, is the one eternal thing in life. After all, you have mastered but one trick—the trick of being loved. With that trick you expect to take the world; but, alas! you capture only an old man's purse or a young man's passion.
Artificial, my letters—yes, if you wish. I should say, not crude—matured, considered. I discuss the love you long to experience. I dangle it before your eyes as a bit of the drapery that goes to the ball of life. But when dawn almost comes and the ball is over, you mustn't expect the paper roses to smell. This mystifies you a little, for you are a plain, downright siren. Your lovers' songs have been in simple measures. Well, the moral is this: take my love-letters as real (in their way) as the play, or rather, the opera; infinitely true for the moment, unreal for the hour, eternal as the dead passions of the ages. Further, it is better to feel the aromatic attributes of love than the dangerous or unlovely reality. You can flirt with number nine or marry number ten, but I shall be stored away in your drawer for a life.