Miss Sarah Farraday, Valley View, Vermont.
Michael Daragh, of course, you goose.
Jane Vail.
New York,
April Twelfth.
Sally Darling,
Thanks for your two wires, though the first one—"So happy, but who is it?" was a bit feeble-minded, you must admit. Could you imagine me marrying any one in the wide world but Michael Daragh? Haven't I always intended to (no matter what I may have babbled of a man-I-met-on-the-boat, or of an extremely civil engineer!) from the first instant I set my wishful eye on his zealot's brow and his fighter's jaw and heard the burbling brogue that might be eaten with a spoon?
It's taken me four years and a subway accident, but I consider the time wholly well spent. I'm snugly and securely engaged to marry Michael Daragh and he's entirely resigned to it. In fact, one might even go so far as to say, without undue exaggeration, that he is pleased!
(I'll wager you dashed right down to the Woman's Exchange and got towels! Aren't you glad V. is such a nice, easy letter to embroider?)
That subway affair was ghastly, useful as it did prove to me. We thought surely our hour had struck, but we behaved with Early Christian Martyr fortitude and much more sprightly cheer, and when Michael Daragh thought the end had come he staged a love scene which made all the love scenes I ever wrote and all the love scenes I ever read sound like time-tables or statistics! Months of misunderstanding were explained away in minutes; he honestly believed me to be secretly engaged to Rodney Harrison (there I see the fine Italian hand of Emma Ellis, poor thing, oh, poor thing—to want Michael Daragh and not to have him!) and he still more honestly believed that I lived and moved and had my brilliant being in a world too far removed from his shabby and cumbered one, and that he was only my more or less valued but humble friend—oh, miles of that sort of piffle! Well, when we were safe in the upper air again, he basely tried to repudiate me,—handsome speeches about not shadowing my bright life and all that—very fetching as literature but not at all satisfying to a young woman who had just achieved a betrothal after long and earnest endeavor! I foiled him! You can't think how brazen I was. I was still a bit hazy with smoke and exhaustion, and I honestly believe if he hadn't given in I'd have screamed for a policeman!
But once he gave up the fruitless struggle, he began to have a very good time indeed. I will even go so far as to state that he hugs his chains.