What should man write about to you but of love and yourself? My pen, I
see, has not lost its personal gait in running over the mill books.
Perhaps it politely anticipates what is expected! So much the better, say,
for you expect what all men give--love and devotion. You would not know
a man who could not love you. Your little world is a circle of
possibilities. Let me explain. Each lover is a possible conception of life
placed at a slightly different angle from his predecessor or successor.
Within this circle you have turned and turned, until your head is a bit
weary. But I stand outside and observe the whirligig. Shall I be drawn in?
No, for I should become only a conventional interest. "If the salt," etc.
I remember you once taught in a mission school.

The flowers will tell me no more! Next time give me a rose--a huge,
hybrid, opulent rose, the product of a dozen forcing processes--and
I will love you a new way. As the flowers say good-by, I will say
goodnight. Shall I burn them? No, for they would smoulder. And if I left
them here alone, to-morrow they would be wan. There! I have thrown them
out wide into that gulf of a street twelve stories below. They will
flutter down in the smoky darkness, and fall, like a message from the land
of the lotus-eaters, upon a prosy wayfarer. And safe in my heart there
lives that gracious picture of my lady as she stands above me and gives
them to me. That is eternal: you and the pinks are but phantoms. Farewell!



NO. II. ACQUIESCENT AND ENCOURAGING.

(_Miss Armstrong replies on a dull blue, canvas-textured page, over which
her stub-pen wanders in fashionable negligence. She arrives on the third