Letters Home. William Dean Howells

do if I happened not to. Miss Ralson was pretty tremendous at first, and from time to time she was tremendous as we went on, but every now and then she broke down, and was not half so awful as I was. I think she saw that if she was to get at me at all, she would have to thaw me out to begin with. She asked me whether I had been to luncheon, and when I made out to remember I hadn't, she said she thought we could talk so much better over a little lunch, and she ordered her maid to order it served to us there; and all the time she kept on talking, and now and then breaking into the largest kind of laugh. She has a head of dark red hair, and the bluest blue eyes, and white cheeks with soft pink in them, and she is built on the sky-scraping plan of the new girl, with shoulders and a neck to beat the band. I have got a fresh supply of slang from Miss Ralson, for after we cosied down to the lunch, she talked so much of it that I had to talk it .too or seem impolite, and I was not going to do that. But she is business, every time, in spite of her ups and downs of manner, and I can tell you she put me through my paces pretty thoroughly.

      She said that they wanted me to be a companion to her mother, and read to her and amuse her any way I could when she and her father could not he at home with her. But they did not want me for that alone; she needed a secretary to write her notes, and keep track of her engagements, and to go with her where a chaperon was not exactly needed, but two girls would do. She asked me if I would just write her a little note, then and there, and say whether I liked the notion, and what salary I should expect; she must have talked that point over with Miss Hally, for she said I could mention twelve hundred if I liked. She put me down at her desk with some note paper, and went away to the window, while I struggled with the note, and she kept coming back to see if I had finished. When I had, she looked pretty hard at it, and compared it with some notes she had received, and then she said. Yes, that would do first-rate. She asked me if I was sure about the spelling, because she always spelt salary -with two Us, and she offered to bet me what I dared that hers was the right way. We referred it to the dictionary leaves in her portfolio, and I won, of course, but we had forgot to say what we had bet, and so I didn't win anything but the bet. She seemed perfectly delighted, and she said that if there was anything she did envy another person it was spelling; and now she felt sure of me, if I thought I could get along with her mother.

      She took me to her mother in the next room, and introduced me, and I had a wicked pleasure in seeing that Mrs. Ralson was more scared than I was. She is a very small old lady, not the least like her daughter, and she began to question me about where I came from, and my family, and whether I was homesick, and didn't I think New York was an awful place. I agreed to everything, and that seemed to cheer her up considerably, and she showed me the photograph of their house in Wottoma, Iowa, where they came from, and said it was considered the most beautiful " home " in the place. She pointed out the windows of her room, which Mr. Ralson had planned for her, and furnished himself, for a surprise, before she ever went into it, and she had never changed a thing. It was before they had formed the Cheese and Churn Trust, and always expected to live in Wottoma, but afterwards nothing would do America but to come to New York. That was better than Europe, anyway, where they had spent a year; and now Mr. Ralson had bought, up between Fifth Avenue and Madison, and they were going to build in the spring, and she supposed they should always live here, but she preferred Wottoma, herself, where you could have some ground around you, and everybody was neighborly. Well, mother, it made me a little homesick to hear her go on, and I showed that I felt for her, and before we got through, we were old friends, and she said she knew we could get on together first-rate, and she would not work me too hard, and I must not let Make. Make was a good girl, but she was thoughtless, and wanted to be on the go the whole while. She got to talking of Miss Ralson by her nickname, (her whole name is America) and of her husband by his first name, and she was so helplessly humble and simple, that I was glad her daughter had gone out of the room, for I am afraid she would have checked her, and I wouldn't have liked that. Mrs. Ralson is New England born, and I told her you were too, and then she seemed to think I was. I explained how Lake Ridge was settled from New England, and she said that if we were the same kind of people, it came to the same thing.

      It is all as different from what I had planned, as could be, but I am not so sorry as I would have supposed. The Ralsons are not an old Knickerbocker family, with stately, highbred ways, and old mahogany sideboards and ancestral silver, but they will be, if they live here long enough; and I shall get on with them much better as they are at present. Perhaps an old Knickerbocker family would not have much use for me; and I shall have a better chance to grow up with the country here if I begin with an old Wottoma family. They may rot send me to Europe for my health, but I think they will let me go "out to see you in May, about apple-blossom time, with a pocket full of money for the June interest. How thankful I ought to be, and how thankful I am! I am going to do everything I can to deserve my good fortune, and you need not be afraid to hear of my misbehaving! It is all settled that I am to begin earning my salary, with two Us, tomorrow. The arrangement is for me to keep on here with Miss Hally, and not to live with the Ralson's, till they get into their house. When they keep me too late for me to get home alone, they will send me in their automobile or get me a room in the hotel. The way they don't mind money, takes my breath away. After I got through with her mother to-day, Miss Ralson asked me how I would like to go shopping with her a little while, and in about two hours I saw her spend a thousand dollars. She bought anything she fancied, and some things that she didn't fancy, as she found out later. But she said you could always exchange them, and if you couldn't you could get rid of them somehow. It is a great thing to have a Cheese and Churn Trust for a father. I have not seen him, yet, but Mrs. Ralson says Miss Ralson is his "perfect image, " and they are just alike, every way.

      I feel as if I had not said anything, and were horrid and unthankful, and I don't know what all. But you mustn't. Tell Lizzie that if she is very, very good, I will let her have some of my old things as soon as I have any new ones.

      With best love to you both,

      Frances.

      X.

      From, Wallace Ardith to A. L. Wibbert, Wottoma.

      New York, Jan'y 10, 1902.

      You dear old fellow:

      You really mustn't print things from my letters, unless you want to take the frankness out of me. I can't write to all Wottoma as ingenuously as I write to you; I can understand your grief at having my good things wasted on you alone, hut I really can't let you share my bounty with the public. If the Day people were to ask me for New York letters, and were to offer me decent pay for them, that would be something to consider — and refuse; for I am going to devote myself to pure literature here, at least till I starve at it; and I can't let the Day have my impressions for nothing, or next to it.

      I wish I had put them down, as I felt them, from moment to moment since I arrived, but perhaps they will be full enough in my letters; of course you will keep my letters, and let me recover them as material for my epic, later on. New York gains in epicality every day, and the wonder is that I don't get familiar with it: I get more and more strange. The novelty of it is simply inexhaustible, and the drama of its tremendous being is past all saying. The other day, as I was walking up town after a cup of tea with the sumptuous America at her hotel, I struck into Broadway, and abandoned myself to the spectacle of the laborers digging the foundations for a skyscraper at one of the corners. They had scooped forty or fifty feet into the earth, below the cellars of the old houses they had torn down, and were drilling into the everlasting rock with steam drills. A whole hive of men were let loose all over the excavation, pitching the earth and broken stones into carts, lifting the carts by derricks to the level of the street, and hitching the horses to them, and working the big steam shovels hanging from the derricks, and the engines were snorting and chuckling and the wheels grinding, and the big horses straining and the men silently shouting at them, — the whole thing muted by the streaming feet of the multitude, and the whine of the trolleys, and the clatter of the wagons, and the crash and roar of the elevated trains; and pretty soon, a mud-covered Italian ran out of the depths with a red flag, and the rest ran to cover, and puff! went a blast that tore up tons of rock, and made no more of a dint in the great mass of noise than if it had been the jet of white vapor that it looked like. Life here is on such