Letters Home. William Dean Howells

York, Dec. 19, 1901.

      My dear Line:

      I have a misgiving that my letter of last night implied a sort of a slight for America Ralson which I certainly do not feel. She has lots of sense, and is as fine as she is frank in the things that become a girl. That is, she is not changed from what you knew, and if anything I wrote gave merely the impression of her physical beauty, it was unfair to her and disgraceful to me. I had no right to speculate about her society prospects even; they may be all she could wish, and still leave her time and place for kindness to me, unworthy. I never liked the Ralson money, but I must say that it seems to crowd my imagination less in New York than it did in Wottoma, and that in old Ralson's civility to me last night I thought there was more personal friendliness than I had realized in him before. He is coarse, but he is not hard, and where there is any little question of his being good to his wife or daughter, he is not so coarse as at other times. These are the hasty conclusions of a man who has eaten his canvas-back and drunken his claret, and ridden in his electric. They might not stand the test of greater experience, but though I own that he is the sort of man born to make money, I do not believe he is altogether selfish, or at least that he is incapable of self-sacrifice where his loving, or even his liking lies. If he did not love you or like you no doubt he would be capable of another sort of sacrifice in which he would not figure as the offering.

      As yet I do not know how many opportunities, I shall have for studying him (he would be great material) for I do not know when I shall be living at the Walhondia. The humiliating fact is, I have done the very thing I should not have done if I had not been more of an ass than I am willing to allow.

      You remember old man Baysley, who used to come from Timber Creek up to Wottoma, in the infant days of Ralson's Trust? Well, he is living now — he would say " residing, " and it's hardly living — in New York where he has some employment from the Cheese and Churn Trust, and is as lonesome as a cat in a strange garret. As luck would have it, he was about the first human being out of two or three millions that I struck against when I got out of my train when I arrived, and he made me promise to come and see " the folks. " At the same time I promised myself that I would not do it, but in about a week I ran across him again and then I was in for it. He took me home with him " to supper " — they dine at twelve o'clock, just as they did in Timber Creek, — and Mrs. Baysley was so pitifully glad to see me, and the girls so proudly glad, that I was rather glad myself. I never really saw much of them at home, though I went to school with the girls when we were children; but country makes kind, and before I knew it, I was sitting before their radiator with them, swapping reminiscences, and making the old people laugh; such simple old souls, and so willing to laugh! The father and mother each confided to me how homesick the other was, and the girls said they did not think New York was half as nice as Timber Creek, to live in, though it would be a great place to come to, for a few weeks in the winter.

      When I got up to go, Mrs. Baysley said, now father must show me the flat. But they all followed through it with me — six little boxes of rooms, counting the parlor and the girls' bedroom portiered off it as two. The whole place was furnished with, their poor old Timber Creek things citified up, and their home carpets cut into rugs. They took me last into the " spare-room " at the back of the flat, and when the old lady let out that they really had more room than they wanted, for all the place seemed so small, and the old man looked anxious, and the girls hung their heads, the time had come for me to make an ass of myself, and I asked what was the matter with my taking that room. They made some decent demur, but not much, and we agreed on three dollars a week; and here I am, pretty far up on the west side of Central Park, about a block and a half from one of the gates, so that I can get in and meditate the thankless muse, as easily as I could from my hotel, where I was paying seven dollars a week for my room, without the sun, or the view of the neighborhood wash which I have here for less than half the money. The wash hangs from lines supported upon lofty flag staffs, behind the house, and it is very gay; if we are five flights up, still the halls and stairs are carpeted in a kind of blood-red tapestry brussels the whole way: Mrs. Baysley is very proud of that carpeting, though it is not hers. When I want to get in, I touch a bell-button in the vestibule, and they free the latch by a sort of electric arrangement in their flat; but the old man promises me a latch-key when he can get round to it. When I'm late, he sits up and lets me in, and the girls keep breakfast for me long after he has gone downtown next morning. I breakfast here, and browse about for lunch and dinner, and accumulate material. Now and then I take a turn at that Central Park incident of the lovers. I have tried it as an idyll, in hexameters, and as a Thackeray ballad, and I have tried it in prose; and it is getting as tough as a piece of bear's meat which the more you chew it the more you can't swallow it. But I don't despair, and won't, as long as you let me sign myself

      Your friend,

      W. A.

      IX.

      From Miss Frances Dennam to Mrs. Dennam, Lake Ridge.

      New York, Jan. 10, 1902.

      Well, mother dear:

      I have got it! I've just sent you a telegram, (I knew they would make you pay fifteen cents for bringing it up from the station,) so as to take away the taste of my last two or three gloomy letters as soon as possible; and now I am going to tell you all about it. When I told you the failure of those two places, that I went to look at with Miss Hally, I was so downhearted that I hardly knew what to do; I wanted to give up, and take the first train home, and try for a school again. But I used all the proverbs I could put my mind on, and I said my prayer when I went to bed, just like a little girl, and cried into my pillow like a big one, and woke the next morning as bold as brass. I went downtown and put in a new advertisement setting forth my gifts and accomplishments, bought all the papers, and read their " wanteds " over my lunch at the Woman's Exchange; and that night I got Miss Hally to go over them with me. We got a good deal of forlorn fun out of it, but not much encouragement, and then Miss Hally proposed a still hunt, as she called it. We . put aside two or three selected wanteds that we decided to investigate and see if they were deserving; and Miss Hally said she would begin the still hunt at once, by writing letters to half a dozen different people who might or might not be looking for a prize of my description, and offer them a chance in the raffle. She said this sort of thing would take time, but the results, even if they were failures would be more satisfactory than the other failures we had made. She looked awfully tired, for she had been writing out a long story, as she called it — a, biography-interview with a new English lecturess who has just come ashore — but she kindled up at the chance of killing herself for me, and when she put me out for the night she kind of held me off by both shoulders, and then pulled me up and kissed me, for luck, as she said, I was so overcome that I could not even shed a tear; I just gasped, and took it in frozen silence, like a true Lake Ridger.

      It seemed to do as well as anything, though, so far as the luck was concerned, I got to thinking afterwards that perhaps it was not the right kind of kiss. The still hunt turned out as badly as the kind of gunning in the newspaper did when I first began to advertise, and when I felt as if everybody could see and hear me. Days, weeks, went by just as they do in novels when the author wants to skip; and yesterday I got word from the public telephone at our corner drug store that there was someone on the wire for me. You can bet, (or you could, if you ever did,) that I didn't let the grass grow under my feet, either on the stairs down to the door, or in the street outside. Somehow I just knew that this time I was it; and sure enough I found it was Miss Hally on the wire. She was calling me from the Hotel Walhondia, and she wanted to know if I could come right down, and I said I could come like lightning, and she told me to inquire for Miss Ralson and I would find her there too.

      Well, I don't know how I got to the hotel or how I lived through sending my name from the office, and then followed it; but before I wanted to be, I was inside the Ralson apartment. Of course by that time I was in my usual frosty calm with strangers; but I tried to limber up enough to answer Miss Ralson's questions, and to realize that Miss Hally was going away and leaving us to each other as soon as the questions began. She gave me a squeeze of the hand that said it was all right, and I felt how nice it was of her not to stay and hear that