Loo Loo's personal charms attracted attention wherever she made her appearance. At church, and other public places, people pointed her out to strangers, saying, "That is the wife of Mr. Alfred Noble. She was the orphan daughter of a rich planter at the South, and had a great inheritance left to her; but Mr. Noble lost it all in the financial crisis of 1837." Her real history remained a secret, locked within their own breasts. Of their three children, the youngest was named Loo Loo, and greatly resembled her beautiful mother. When she was six years old, her portrait was taken in a gypsy hat garlanded with red berries. She was dancing round a little white dog, and long streamers of ribbon were floating behind her. Her father had it framed in an arched environment of vine-work, and presented it to his wife on her thirtieth birth-day. Her eyes moistened as she gazed upon it; then kissing his hand, she looked up in the old way, and said, "I thank you, Sir, for buying me."
LETTER-WRITING.
A friend, who happens to have an idea or two of his own, is constantly advising his acquaintances in no case to become parties to a regular correspondence. He is a great letter-writer himself, but never answers an epistle, unless it contain queries as to matters of fact, or be an invitation to a ball or a dinner,—unless, in a word, real, not what he considers conventional politeness requires; in which event, his reply is despatched at once. Under all other circumstances, he ignores the last missive from him or her to whom his envelope is addressed. He studiously frames his own communications in such wise, that they do not call for an answer. He will totally neglect an intimate friend for months, then let fly at him epistle after epistle, and then give no sign of life for a long while again. If asked to exchange letters once a week or once a fortnight, he solemnly inquires whether the wind goes by machinery, and is, after a given interval, invariably at such o'clock,—adding, that it is his aim, not to keep up, but to keep down, correspondence. If accused of "owing a letter," he repudiates the obligation, and affirms that he will go to jail sooner than pay it off. If taxed with heartlessness, he retorts by asking whether it can be the duty of a moral being to insult a man by writing to him when there is nothing to say.
That these notions, whether they did or did not originate in an unfortunate love-affair, which my friend is said to have gone through in his youth, contain grains of truth may be easily shown.
I drop a letter in the New York post-office to-day; my friend in Boston receives it to-morrow and pens a reply at once, which finds me in New York within twenty-four hours. He may have understood and really answered my epistle. But suppose him to have waited a week. New matters have, meantime, taken possession of both his mind and mine; the topics, which were fresh when I wrote, have lost their interest; the bridge between us is broken down. His reply is worth little more to me than water to flowers cut a month since, or seed to a canary that was interred with tears last Saturday.
Correspondence is conversation carried on under certain peculiar conditions, but subject to the same rules as conversation by word of mouth, except so far forth as they may be modified by those necessary conditions. You do not take your partner's bright saying home with you and bring a repartee to the next ball, by which time she has forgotten what her bon mot was, and has another, every whit as good, upon her lips; you do not return a lead in whist at the next rubber; you do not postpone the laugh over the jokes of the dinner-table, as is fabulously narrated of Washington, until you have retired for the night. In social intercourse, minds must meet before one person can be brought to another's mood or both to a middle ground; it is the friction of contact, that creates conversation. A remark, not answered the instant after it has been made, is never answered. The bores and boors of society, not the gentlemen and ladies, ruminate upon what has been said, elaborate replies at leisure, and serve them up unseasonably.
For the purposes of correspondence, one may and must throw himself back into the immediate past and assume the mood that was his when he wrote and in which alone a reply can find him. But there is a limit to this power, which is soon reached. Not many letters will keep sweet more than two days. A little indulgence may, perhaps, be shown toward persons who are a week or a fortnight from us by the post, since otherwise we could never converse together. But even they should reply to only the weightier matters suggested, since what they say will probably be stale before it reaches the eyes for which it was written. For the like reasons, I hold a Californian or European correspondence to be an impossibility. As for him whose want of politeness fixes a gulf, a week broad, between himself and his correspondent, there is no excuse. As one reads a letter, an answer to whatever worth answering may be in it leaps to the lips; to give it utterance that moment is the only natural, courteous, and truthful course. Ten days hence, the reply, which now comes of its own accord, cannot be found; what might have been a source of pleasure to two persons will have become a piece of thankless drudgery. In vain the conscientious correspondent, at the appointed time, takes the letter which she would answer out of the compartment of her portfolio, whereon stationers, cunningly humoring a popular weakness, have gilded,—"UNANSWERED LETTERS." In vain she cons it with care, comments upon every observation in it, answers all its questions one by one, and propounds a series of her own, as a basis for the next epistle. Everything has been done decently and in order; but the laboriously-produced letter is a letter which killeth, and contains no infusion of the spirit that giveth life. This is not the writer's fault. It is and must be all but impossible, after a lapse of time, to reproduce the natural reply to a remark, or to concoct one that shall be vital and satisfactory to the other party.
Lovers, of all persons, it would seem, might with least danger postpone answering each other's missives, since their common topic of interest is always with them, and the billet-doux, after having been carried in the bosom a week, is as fresh as when taken from the post-office. What need for "sweet sixteen" to consume the very night of its reception in essaying a reply, which she might have written next week as well, since next week they two will stand in substantially the same relations to one another as now? "Sweet sixteen" smiles at such coldblooded logic. "To you others," thinks she to herself, "all sunsets may be alike; but in our horizon are constant changes, delicate tones of color, each
'Shade so finely touched love's sense must seize it.'
The mood into which Walter's note put me may never return again. Now it is correspondent to the mood in which he wrote; now or never must I reply. In this way alone can we keep up a correspondence between our natures."