Devotedly,
Jane.
P.S. You might ring up Aunt Lyddy and ask her to send me that little Botticelli picture—my bare walls are rather bleak.
Jane settled jubilantly into the new life,—a brisk walk after breakfast, up the gay Avenue or down the gray streets below the Square, then three honest hours at the elderly typewriter, writing at top speed ... tearing up all she had written ... writing slowly, polishing a paragraph with passionate care, salvaging perhaps a page, perhaps a sentence out of the morning's toil. Then she hooded her machine, lunched, and gave herself up to an afternoon of vivid living,—a Russian pianist, or an exhibition of vehemently modern pictures screaming their message from quiet walls in a Fifth Avenue Gallery, an hour at Hope House Settlement with Emma Ellis or Michael Daragh, tea and dancing with Rodney Harrison, or dinner and a play with him, or a little session of snug coziness with Mrs. Hetty Hills, giving the exile news of the Vermont village,—nothing was dull or dutiful; the prosiest matters of every day were lined with rose. She dramatized every waking moment. She was going to work, she wrote Sarah.
I have been just marking time before, but now I'm marching, Sally. I was up at six-thirty, had a cold dip and a laborer's breakfast,—I'm afraid I haven't any temperament in my appetite, you know—and sped off for atmosphere and ozone, far below the Square, on a two-mile tramp, and now I'm about to write. Rodney Harrison, who knows everybody who is anybody, has introduced me to some vaudeville-powers-that-be and I am encouraged to try my hand at what they call a sketch—a one-act play. It seems that they are in need of something a little less thin than the usual article they've been serving up to their patrons,—more of a playlet; something, I suppose, to edify the wife of the Tired Business Man after he has enjoyed the Tramp Juggler and the Trained Seals. Rodney Harrison has helped me no end,—trotted me about to all the best places and helped me to study and learn from them, and now I'm ready to begin.
And—heavens—how I adore it, Sally!
It's breaking my iron schedule to write a letter in business hours but I knew you'd love to picture me here, gleefully clicking off dollars and fame. Poor lamb! I wish you were on a job like this, instead of pegging away at your piano. I wish there could be as much fun in your work as mine. Of course, music is the most marvelous thing in the world, but isn't there something of deadly monotony in it?
But I fly to my toil!
Busily,