“One simply doesn’t go and see the Tower, because that’s what trippers do. Don’t you understand, my dear? (Pardon the ‘my dear’ again.) The Tower is the sort of thing school superintendents see and then go back and lecture on in school assembly-room and the G. A. R. hall. I’ll take you to the Tate Gallery.” Then, very abruptly, “G’ night,” and she was gone.
He stared after her smooth back, thinking: “Gee! I wonder if she got sore at something I said. I don’t think I was fresh this time. But she beat it so quick…. Them lips of hers—I never knew there was such red lips. And an artist—paints pictures!… Read a lot—Nitchy—German musical comedy. Wonder if that’s that ‘Merry Widow’ thing?… That gray dress of hers makes me think of fog. Cur’ous.”
In her room Istra Nash inspected her nose in a mirror, powdered, and sat down to write, on thick creamy paper:
Skilly dear, I’m in a fierce Bloomsbury boarding-house—bores —except for a Phe-nomenon—little man of 35 or 40 with embryonic imagination & a virgin soul. I’ll try to keep from planting radical thoughts in the virgin soul, but I’m tempted.
Oh Skilly dear I’m lonely as the devil. Would it be too bromid. to say I wish you were here? I put out my hand in the darkness, & yours wasn’t there. My dear, my dear, how desolate—Oh you understand it only too well with your supercilious grin & your superior eye-glasses & your beatific Oxonian ignorance of poor eager America.
I suppose I am just a barbarous Californian kiddy. It’s just as Pere Dureon said at the atelier, “You haf a’ onderstanding of the ’igher immorality, but I ’ope you can cook—paint you cannot.”
He wins. I can’t sell a single thing to the art editors here or get one single order. One horrid eye-glassed earnest youth who Sees People at a magazine, he vouchsafed that they “didn’t use any Outsiders.” Outsiders! And his hair was nearly as red as my wretched mop. So I came home & howled & burned Milan tapers before your picture. I did. Though you don’t deserve it.
Oh damn it, am I getting sentimental? You’ll read this at Petit Monsard over your drip & grin at your poor unnietzschean barbarian.
I. N.