Now will you shake hands again, although it’s my left one this time?
Yours as ever,
R. H.
December 20th.
I have another letter from Bobby. And I didn’t answer his last letter. As I read it a wicked little joy steals in on me and grows and grows.
New York, December 18th.
My Dear Miss Carrie:
Now get mad if you want to, but couldn’t you agree to let somebody call you that? (Bobby has scratched out the “Miss.”) That’s the way I think of you, and if you insist on being called by your golf and automobile name of Carrie, why, tear up this letter and throw it out the kitchen window over the cliff.
Why didn’t you answer my last letter? Rowing on the lake, I suppose, with the gent that comes to see you. I hope the lake will freeze. And I hope the gent—won’t freeze. So, there!
I am looking over your last letter to-night, and it’s like the breath of a spring wind through a laurel thicket. I’m going to take it page by page and answer it.
The first page contains a quotation from a letter to you from an insect known as a “literary agent.” Dear Carrie, listen to the chirp of the crickets on the mountain, but don’t pay any attention to the noise of that tribe. I am fortunate enough not to know this particular duffer that has written such “piffle” (as they say in Chicago), but I’ve heard about him—and you cut him out. He’s an insufferable, measly kid, at the Sweet Caporal cigarette age, and his graft is to stuff you provincial writers (I’m speaking impersonally now) with his taffy so he can get your stuff to peddle around. Don’t you believe his trick; and you quit sending him your stuff. He’s trying to make you think you’ve got George Eliot and Mrs. Humphry Ward beat to a batter, when you know yourself it ain’t so. Isn’t that a sage, oh, what a wonderfully sage remark when he says “you must write your best!”