I remember when I first woke in that harbor. I felt like a heroine of
grand opera surrounded by untruly beautiful painted scenery. Nothing
in my four trips to Europe ever thrilled me like the queer sights and
tastes and smells of those three warm weeks seven years ago. And ever
since, I've panted to get back. When I stop to think about it, I can
hardly bring myself to swallow our unexciting meals; I wish to be dining
on curries and tamales and mangos. Isn't it funny? You'd think I must
have a dash of Creole or Spanish or some warm blood in me somewhere,
but I'm nothing on earth but a chilly mixture of English and Irish and
Scotch. Perhaps that is why I hear the South calling. "The palm dreams
of the pine, and the pine of the palm."
After seeing you off, I turned back to New York with an awful
wander-thirst gnawing at my vitals. I, too, wanted to be starting off
on my travels in a new blue hat and a new blue suit with a big bunch
of violets in my hand. For five minutes I would cheerfully have said
good-by forever to poor dear Gordon in return for the wide world
to wander in. I suppose you are thinking they are not entirely
incompatible--Gordon and the wide world--but I don't seem able to get
your point of view about husbands. I see marriage as a man must, a good,
sensible workaday institution; but awfully curbing to one's liberty.
Somehow, after you're married forever, life has lost its feeling of
adventure. There aren't any romantic possibilities waiting to surprise
you around each corner.
The disgraceful truth is that one man doesn't seem quite enough for me.
I like the variety of sensation that you get only from a variety of men.
I'm afraid I've spent too flirtatious a youth, and it isn't easy for me
to settle.
I seem to have a very wandering pen. To return: I saw you off, and took
the ferry back to New York with a horribly empty feeling. After our
intimate, gossipy three months together, it seems a terrible task to
tell you my troubles in tones that will reach to the bottom of the
continent. My ferry slid right under the nose of your steamer, and
I could see you and Jervis plainly leaning on the rail. I waved
frantically, but you never blinked an eyelash. Your gaze was fixed in
homesick contemplation upon the top of the Woolworth Building.
Back in New York, I took myself to a department store to accomplish
a few trifles in the way of shopping. As I was entering through their
revolving doors, who should be revolving in the other direction but
Helen Brooks! We had a terrible time meeting, as I tried to go back out,
and she tried to come back in; I thought we should revolve eternally.
But we finally got together and shook hands, and she obligingly helped
me choose fifteen dozen pairs of stockings and fifty caps and sweaters
and two hundred union suits, and then we gossiped all the way up to
Fifty-second Street, where we had luncheon at the Women's University
Club.