Don’t chain up your impulses, dear friend; let ’em skallyhoot around. We don’t live more than nine times; and bottles and chains weren’t made for people to confine and tie up their good impulses with.
So you shook your head when you read that I was thinking of you last week? All right. Couldn’t expect you to believe. But please turn to page 78 and page 131 of the book I sent you, and try to think whose eyes I attempted to describe. Since I saw you last I’ve seen only one pair of eyes like that; and they—well, they only resembled.
Think I’m foolish? Oh, no, I’m not. One can have an ideal if one wants to. I’ve had one for—years. All I’ve had since have busted and gone up the flume. Please, Miss Carrie, lemme keep that one. I ain’t going to bother you about it. You say those old days are laid away between lavender scented sheets. I can understand that for you. Mine are not. They are fresh and fragrant, dewy and everlasting. I’m not going to insist upon your believing it—shake your head if you want to and give the sun a chance to brighten his rays. I’m superior to luck, fate, history, and time. If I choose to stand under a certain window yet in Roseboro and sigh for the unattainable, no one shall balk me. So, don’t you try to bulldoze me, Miss Caroline Howard. If my spirit elects to wander there, please you let it alone.
Do you know that over there in the Ridge of blue and gold you are the most splendidly endowed of all the daughters of the gods? Why? Because my memory tells me that you have (to my memorial eye and mind) all that can be conferred of loveliness; and, according to your boast, you have a new and delectable way of fixing tomatoes. Now, I adore tomatters. I could die for ’em, I nearly have several times. You can’t imagine how interested I was in your tomato garden. In your tomato garden. Say—I believe you promulgated some nonsense in your letter about whether I stood under Fifth Avenue girls’ windows about midnight and sent up flowers and candies. Why, lemme tell you, Miss Carrie, I’ve seen ’em and talked to ’em, and had tea with ’em—and lemme tell you—I’d rather set (not sit) across a little table with you and have a tomatter between us with ice and——
Say—I don’t agree with you about the nuts. Why, I never saw a tomatter in my life stuffed with nuts. Air they good? The ice sounds all right. And lemme tell you—I think you’re wrong about the Mayonnaise dressing. I have such a respect for tomatters that I must challenge you. French dressing, with green peppers—so say I.
And yet it is no more than Cosmic and Natural Justice that you should be woozy about the proper way to fix tomatters. Perfection has never been attained by mortals. (Now my memory is at work again.) If you could be as I remember you and an expert in tomatters, too, why there would be double perfection, and that’s an unknown quantity in mathematics. I prefer to retain my ideal; therefore the deduction is: your tomatters are off their trolley. Still, I’d like to try one. That’s constancy and faith. Will you keep one on ice for me, on the chance that good Fortune may allow me to drift down that way?
I sent up yesterday and got the Christmas Leslies. Why, I remembered that story, though I didn’t recognize the name. It was very sweet and tender. I can see that you like kids. I congratulate you heartily on your work; I hope you will find it profitable and a blessing. You have unquestioned sympathy and a deep and true “humanness.” You ought to come to New York, where you will be in medias res. There’s nothing like being on the ground. You get artistic ideas and associations here that would be invaluable to you. Writing is a bully game. You want to know the dealers. I studied that fact out, and came here. To-day I get five times more per word than when I came. Sister of the pen and stamped-envelope-for-return, I speak wisdom to you. And here is life. Beautiful are the mountains and the moon silvering their tops; but here one learns the value of each upon each. And the moonlight of the mind is the most beautiful. Here art teaches Nature to conform. You could expand and rise here. I do not advise you, but I speak with wisdom of the markets and the heart. Pardon me if I am scornful of the Mayonnaise, and am dubious about the nuts. I could overlook a stab at my heart with a poniard, but—the tomatter and I have been friends. Yet I could—may I try one the way you fix ’em?
Wish I could have accepted your invitation to sail down on the big golden bubble of a moon, and drap under the cherry tree. Bet a dollar I’d have lit on the rake and the hoe you left there in the grass. Can’t you ever remember to put ’em behind the door in the woodhouse when you are scratching around in the garden? I haven’t ridden on the moon in a long time. It’s on the full now, and I’m afraid I’d slide off. When it gets to look like a slice of canteloupe again, so I can hold on to the ends, I’ll try to make that trip. Please spread an armful of hay and an old piece of carpet under the cherry tree so I won’t come down with such a jolt when I jump off. Then I’d say something like this:
“Miss Howard, please excuse my intrusion into your section of real estate devoted to domestic agriculture; but the object of my somewhat precipitous descent is to ascertain the identity of a certain youthful and pulchritudinous being with whom at a considerably earlier period I sustained cognizance, and whose identification is relatively dependent upon a tonsorial arrangement in which her tresses retain the perpendicularity peculiar to juvenility at the time referred to.”
And you would answer: