Fräulein Schmidt and Mr. Anstruther

IX

Dearest,—I don't think I like that girl at all. Your letter from Clinches has just come, and I don't think I like her at all. What is more, I don't think I ever shall like her. And what is still more, I don't think I even want to. So your idea of her being a good friend to me later on in London must retire to that draughty corner of space where abortive ideas are left to eternal shivering. I'm sorry if I am offensively independent. But then I know so well that I won't be lonely if I'm with you, and I think rooting up, which you speak of as a difficult and probably painful process, must be very nice if you are the one to do it, and I am sure I could never by any possibility reach such depths of strangeness and doubt about what to do next as would induce me to stretch out appealing hands to a young woman with eyes that, as you put it, tilt at the corners. I wish you hadn't told her about us, about me. It has profaned things so, dragged them out into the streets, cheapened them. I don't in the least want to tell my father, or any one else. Does this sound as though I were angry? Well, I don't think I am. On the contrary, I rather want to laugh. You dear silly! So clever and so simple, so wise and crammed with learning, and such a dear, ineffable goose. How old am I, I wonder? Only as old as you? Really only as old? Nonsense: I'm fifteen, twenty years your senior, my dear sir. I've lived in Jena, you in London I frequent Kaffee-Klatsches, and you the great world. I talk much with Johanna in the kitchen, and you with heaven knows what in the way of geniuses. Yet no male Nancy Cheriton, were his eyelids never so tilted, would wring a word out of me about a thing so near, so precious, so much soul of my soul as my lover.

How would you explain this? I've tried and can't.

Your rebellious

ROSE-MARIE.

Darling, darling, don't ask me to like Nancy. The thing's unthinkable.

Later.

Now I know why I am wiser than you: life in kitchens and Klatsches turns the soul gray very early. Didn't one of your poets sing of somebody who had a sad lucidity of soul? I'm afraid that is what's the matter with me.