CHAPTER V
I
May 1, 1900.
Dearest Judy: Neal says that when you say for me not to write anything about people unless I can write good things about them you are displaying the worst sort of Quilter sentimentality. Uncle Phineas says that your dictum would deplete the libraries. He says to tell you that, if you don’t know your Plato, you should know your Boswell and your Pepys. But Grandfather says that the whole secret of the art of letter writing lies in writing not what one wishes to chronicle, but what the recipient can find delight in reading. So, I shall try to write only good things about everyone in your letters. Just now that may be difficult. It can’t be helped. And, if you should change your mind, after having Neal’s and Uncle Phineas’s opinions, please let me know.
You ask what has happened to my lessons. It was necessary to discontinue them for a while, after Chris and Irene came home. Aunt Gracia was too busy to hear them. But now I am having them every day with Chris. And, of course, my Latin twice a week with Grandfather, and my music and French with Olympe.
Chris has time now for my lessons. He has stopped helping Father and Neal with the ranch work and has begun his writing again. He was no real help, anyway, to Father and Neal. And, when he writes, there is always a possibility that he may make a great deal of money and also achieve fame. He has begun a new play and has the cast of characters all made out. The leading man’s rôle is to be for Nat Goodwin.
Irene is happier now that Christopher stays in the house all the time with her. We have tried to get her to ride with us, but she is afraid even of Wednesday’s Child. She says she would not be afraid to ride in a ladies’ phaëton, if we had one. She has sent to New York for some of her household things that she left there. When they come she is going to fix up her room and Chris’s so that it can be called a studio.
Yesterday was Olympe’s sixty-first birthday. We had dinner in the evening and a celebration. Olympe sat in Grandfather’s chair at the head of the table, and remembered her chin, and was superb. Especially superb when everyone stood and drank her toast with the table claret we had left over from your wedding. Dong Lee baked a triumph of a cake, and we put one tall wax taper in its centre. (White wax tapers always remind me of Aunt Gracia.) I wish we might celebrate for Olympe several times each year. She is so transcendent when she is happy. Even Irene said, last night, that Olympe was not unlike Sarah Bernhardt. We missed you and Greg so much that not one of us mentioned either of you all evening.
I fear that what you suggest about my sense of humour may be just. It has often troubled me. But Grandfather says humour is a faculty which develops late. He says one should not blame me for not having a fully developed sense of humour, unless one is willing to blame me for not having a fully developed stature. He says that my sense of humour is coming on nicely; that I have a sense of wit and a sense of the ludicrous, and that the more subtle sense will develop as I develop. I hope it is true. But I know that Grandfather is inclined to overrate my abilities. Irene says he greatly overrates them. She has a little girl friend, only fourteen years old, who is a reporter on one of the big New York daily papers. Grandfather said that he presumed the child was an orphan. Irene said no indeed she was not. Are orphans supposed to be brighter than other children?
Dear sister, I send very much love to you and Greg.—Lucy.
II
May 30, 1900.
Dearest Judy dear: I am glad that you have given me some leeway about writing. Until your letter came, it seemed impossible for me to write at all.
It is Uncle Phineas’s fault. He wishes to join the new gold rush to Nome, Alaska, and he is trying to get Chris to go with him. Uncle Phineas, while he doesn’t seem old, is edging close to seventy. Chris has had no training for hardships, and would not know a gold mine from a gopher hole. We could not raise money anywhere for them to go properly equipped. If we could, according to the warnings in the newspapers, the expedition would be, as Grandfather says, criminal folly. (Of course, all I have been writing about this is gleanings from the elders.) The Oregonian, a few days ago, had an account of the dreadful dangers and hardships that gold seekers are having to endure. But, in spite of everything, Uncle Phineas and Chris forge right ahead with their plans. It makes one think that Aunt Gracia is right about the childishness of men—though Grandfather and darling Father would have to be the exceptions that prove that rule.
Olympe is wearing her dreariest gowns and is more tragic than I have ever seen her. She has added ever so many clauses to her Quilter men speech (none of them pleasant), and has revised the Quilter wives’ speech until it is almost heartbreaking. But Irene has reformed. She offers quite often to dust the rooms. She reads Elbert Hubbard, and Neal says that she is conspicuously living, loving, laughing, and doing things worth while. That seems well enough to me. Neal says that it is wormy. Everything is wormy for Neal, lately. It is an unpleasant new word of his. Marriage, he says, is wormy. He has resolved never to marry. Even love, he says, is wormy. He says it does to men what barnacles do to ships. He says to look at what a fine, free-sailing craft Chris was, before Irene barnacled him all over with her messy love. Neal is growing cynical and pessimistic. Grandfather says it doesn’t matter; it is an unavoidable phase of male adolescence.
Some of Irene’s household things have come. She has not unpacked them yet, as she doesn’t care to have the room called a studio if Chris goes to Nome. Possibly, then, she would like a boudoir. (She has been asking me how to spell French and Latin words for her, when she writes to her friends. I have told her for weeks. But, after thinking it over, I decided, one day, it would be kinder to tell her what Grandfather said about using foreign words in one’s letters. She cried, and told Chris that I had said she was vulgar. I had not. I apologized, though, to please her. I didn’t mind at all.) She has unpacked some of her linen, to put it in the blue closet so it won’t turn yellow. It is not as handsome as our best linen, but better than our third best and much more fancy. She has big initials embroidered on it. The initial is “B.” I asked her why, since I had thought her name had been Irene Guildersen.
She was much astonished to discover that the others had not told me Christopher was her second husband. She seemed proud of it. She told me very admirable things about her first husband, who is still living. She divorced him.
Later, when discussing the matter with members of the family, I found that all of them, except Aunt Gracia, approve of divorce and think there is nothing even odd about it if, they said, it was procured because of genuine provocation. These opinions of theirs make it hard for me to understand why none of them had told me about Irene’s divorce. Sometimes, though rarely, I agree with Neal, who is declaring, of late, that there is no accounting for Quilters.
I love you dearly. I love Greg dearly, too.—Lucy.