Letters Home. William Dean Howells
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was staring straight at us, till father got up and sort of bulged down on him, and shouted out, " Well, Wottoma, every time! " And in about a second, Mr. Ardith was sitting opposite me, with a napkin across his knees, and talking his soup cold under the latest news from home. Well, Caro, it was like some of the old South High Street times, and it made me homesick to hear all the old names. And what do you think father did after dinner? He made Mr. Ardith come up to our rooms, and the first thing I knew he was asking him how he would like to go to the theatre with us, if he had nothing better to do. He made a failure of trying to think of something, and the next thing I knew, father was bending over us in the box after the first act, with a hand on a shoulder apiece of us, (have I got that straight?) and asking us if we minded his going, and letting us get home at our convenience. I looked up and tried to frown him still, but it was no use. He just said, " I'll send the carriage back for you, Make, " and went.
I don't believe Mr. Ardith knew there was anything unusual in it, and I never let on. I hurried up the talk, and we talked pure literature. I saw I was in for it, and I tried to make him believe that I had read all the latest publications, and was taking a course of George Meredith between times. After while he began to hint round after you, Caro: he did, honest! He said he supposed I heard from you, and I said, very rarely; you must be so much taken up with the Wottoma gayeties. He may have merely asked about you for a bluff, and to show that he was not going to ask. He went on and talked a little more about you, kind of with a ten-foot pole, and getting further and further off all the time, till he got clear to New York, and then he talked about nothing but New York. He is crazy about the place, and sees it as a poem, he says; goodness knows what he means! He got quite up into the clouds, and he did not come down again till we reached home.
I saw that he wanted to do the handsome thing, and I allowed him to order some expensive food at the table we usually take, for I knew that it would hurt his pride if I didn't. He seemed to have a good appetite, but he went on more psychologically than ever, and I was never so glad as when he said goodnight to me at our door — except when father wanted him to come in, and he wouldn't. Yes, Caro, Mr. Ardith is too many for me, but I respect him, and if I could scratch up a little more culture perhaps I could more than respect him. He certainly is a nice boy.
We shall probably be at the Walhondia, the whole winter. You see life here, and although it is not exactly the kind of New York life that I am after, it is New York life, because it's all strangers, I would like you to see it once, and why couldn't you come on and pay me that visit? I would like nothing better than to blow in a few thousand on a show for you, and ask the Four Hundred to meet you. Father would believe they all came, and he would like the blowing-in anyway. He is not going to die disgraced, as Mr. Carnegie says, and he can't die poor if the Trust keeps soaring as it has for the last six months. Better come, Caro, for perhaps when we get into our new house on the East Side next winter, I may not want you, and now I do want you. Come! I'll give a little theatre dinner for you, and I'll ask Mr. Ardith. There!
As we used to say when we thought we knew French,
Toute a, vous.
Make.
New York, December the Eighteenth, Nineteen Hundred and One.
V.
From Miss Frances Dennam to Mrs. Ansel Gr. Dennam, Lake Ridge, New York.
New York, Dec. 19, 1901.
Dear Mother:
I have the greatest mind to be like a good girl in a book, and tell you that I have got my ideal place; I know you are so anxious; but I guess I had better not. I am not the least bit discouraged, for I am sure to find it, though it does seem a little too much on the shrinking violet order. When I think of the number of ideal places that I am adapted to, I wonder they can all escape me; and I know I shall run one of them down at last. There are places which I could have got before now if I had not set my mark so high. Only yesterday I was offered a situation as hello-girl at a telephone station, and I could be sitting this moment with the transmitter at my mouth, and the receivers strapped to both ears, and looking as if I were just going to be electrocuted, if I had chosen. Perhaps I may decide to go into Sunday journalism. How would you like that — if you knew what it was? My chum, Miss Hally, is a Sunday journalist, and perfect bundle of energy. I believe she could work me in easily. She is from the South, or Soath, as she calls it, and she is one of these Southern women you meet here in New York, who make you think Southern women got so much rest in the old slavery times, that they never want to rest any more. They beat us poor Northern things all hollow in getting places, and the fact is that the only place I've got yet is the place I live in. That boarding house got to be a little too much, and before my week was up, on Wednesday, I began prospecting. Miss Hally went round with me and it was very well she did, because it is easier to get out of a tight place if there are two of you, and to make up flattering excuses, than it is if there is only one. In New York you have to be so careful — you have no idea in Lake Ridge how careful. Whole neighborhoods are barred, and sometimes when the streets are nice you have to pass through others that are not; it's horrid. Well, it all ended, much sooner than we could expect, in our finding these two rooms, five pair up, in an apartment with respectable people who are glad to let them, and let us get breakfast in their kitchen. We go out for our lunches and dinners to a French boarding-house in the neighborhood, where the food is wonderful and the men all smoke cigarettes at the table; but they do not mean anything by it. Our rooms look south over a beautiful landscape of chimneys, and it is astonishing how all chimneys seem to be out of order and have to have something done to them; there is not a perfectly well chimney as far as the eye can reach. One room we use as a parlor, and the other has two let-down beds in it, and both are full of sun. It is delightful, and I know things are going to turn out just as I wish, for if you wish hard enough they have got to.
You mustn't fret, or else I shall come home and shake you. My hundred dollars will last three months, or I will know the reason why. I think I will advertise, and get Miss Hally to go over the answers with me, and tell me which ones I had better follow up. She knows New York through and through, and if anyone can help me run down my ideal employer she can. I have not swerved from a single requirement: age, amiability, opulence, with an eye on Europe in the spring. She -will not have much for me to do: just notes to write, accounts to keep, friends to receive and excuse her to, reading aloud in the evenings, with a perfectly ridiculous consideration for my strength, because I am long and rather limp and slab-sided, and must be sick; I shall have to overcome her fears for my health before she will consent to take me even on trial, and nothing but something strangely fascinating in me will help me to win the day. The only condition she will make is that I shall pay you a good long visit in May, before we sail. Perhaps she will let me begin it before, if she sees I am homesick, which I shall not be, and you needn't think it. But I suppose the sunset still has that burnished crimson through the orchard and over the lake, and the Ridge woods are all red in it, and the vineyards black — how purple they were with grapes when I left! The chickens have gone to roost in the peach trees, and the guinea-hens are trying to make up their minds to, and you are standing by the gate looking wistfully down to the desolate depot for your runaway girl, and wondering how she is. She is very, very well, mum, and she is coming home with a pocketful of money to pay off that mortgage. But if you stand there at the gate, looking that way, mother, you will break my heart! Go in, this minute, or you will take cold, and then what shall I do? Give my love to all inquiring friends — very nasal love, and not sweeter than you can conscientiously make it. Then the neighbors will know that it is honest. Love to Lizzie, and tell her to be very good to you.
Your affectionate daughter,
Frances.
VI.
From Miss Frances Dennam to Mrs. A. G. Dennam, Lake Ridge.
New York, December 26, 1901.
Dear Mother:
I was disappointed yesterday in not getting that ideal place to send you for a Christmas present. It would have been