“Sir, regretting the futility of your rather incomprehensible errand—which, had you been better versed in the more recent dictates of fashion, might have been advantageously and indefinitely postponed—I must inform you that none of the coiffures that are worn this summer allow any such primitive and adolescent arrangement of the capillary filaments as you refer to in your preamble; and therefore, as far as the little girl whose hair was in a plait is concerned, there is nothing doing.”
I’ll bet that’s what’d happen to me. And then I’d have to go down to the road and sit on the fence and wait a month to catch the moon back.
Miss Carrie, please, please send me that picture of yourself that you mentioned, or another one. If your heart hadn’t been so hard and cruel you’d have enclosed it before instead of talking about it. How can you write those tender and kind little stories when really you are so unfeeling and stony hearted? You knew I wanted that picture. I’m going to tell all the editors I know that your work is a fraud—that you don’t feel it at all.
No doubt there isn’t a single tear in your eye or the slightest thawing of your heart when I remind you that in another two weeks I shall be treading the pathless wilds of Maine. There in the dense tropical forest an infuriated porcupine may spring upon me from some lofty iceberg, or, becoming lost, I might perish in the snow of sunstroke. Think, Miss Carrie, what an ad it would be for you when the papers printed the news of a tourist found in the woods—an unknown man wearing tennis shoes and a woollen comforter, with 30 cents in his pocket, a frozen tomato in one hand, and a picture of the well-known and beautiful authoress C. H. in the other. It is no less than your duty to your publishers to try and get that ad. So, please send on the picture, will you?
Sincerely yours,
Robert Haralson.
Is it because I live here on the edge of the world, outside of its activity, that I read Bobby’s letter over and over? Is that the reason I search page 78 and page 131 of the book? The eyes of Bobby’s heroine are beautiful, and he says they are like mine. It was dear of him to remember the colour of my eyes through all these years. I couldn’t have told the colour of his eyes. And I fibbed when I said those old memories were laid away in lavender scented sheets. That’s the trouble with a spinster. She can be counted on to run to sentiment with or without encouragement.
Oh, dear, I’m so tired. I want life different—not just to go in and eat supper and look over the lessons for to-morrow and read something and go to bed, as I have done all the nights of the past twelve Octobers and am likely to continue for the next several dozen of them. I fibbed when I wrote Bobby I had memories. I haven’t. And I don’t want memories—memories that sigh of age. I want joys that dance with youth. I want to sit at a little table and look across—not at John.
October 6th.
Friday.