University of Virginia Library

2. II.

My dear Jack: I had a line from Dillon this
morning, and was rejoiced to learn that your
hurt is not so bad as reported. Like a certain
personage, you are not so black and blue as you
are painted. Dillon will put you on your pins
again in two or three weeks, if you will only
have patience and follow his counsels. Did you
get my note of last Wednesday? I was greatly
troubled when I heard of the accident.

I can imagine how tranquil and saintly you
are with your leg in a trough! It is deuced
awkward, to be sure, just as we had promised
ourselves a glorious month together at the seaside;
but we must make the best of it. It is
unfortunate, too, that my father's health renders
it impossible for me to leave him. I think he
has much improved; the sea air is his native

element; but he still needs my arm to lean upon
in his walks, and requires some one more careful
than a servant to look after him. I cannot
come to you, dear Jack, but I have hours of
unemployed time on hand, and I will write you
a whole post-office full of letters if that will
divert you. Heaven knows, I have n't anything
to write about. It is n't as if we were
living at one of the beach houses; then I could
do you some character studies, and fill your
imagination with groups of sea-goddesses, with
their (or somebody else's) raven and blond
manes hanging down their shoulders. You
should have Aphrodite in morning wrapper, in
evening costume, and in her prettiest bathing
suit. But we are far from all that here. We
have rooms in a farm-house, on a cross-road,
two miles from the hotels, and lead the quietest
of lives.

I wish I were a novelist. This old house,
with its sanded floors and high wainscots, and
its narrow windows looking out upon a cluster
of pines that turn themselves into æolian-harps
every time the wind blows, would be the place in
which to write a summer romance. It should be

a story with the odors of the forest and the breath
of the sea in it. It should be a novel like one
of that Russian fellow's,—what's his name?
— Tourguénieff, Turguenef, Turgenif, Toorguniff,
Turgénjew, — nobody knows how to spell
him. Yet I wonder if even a Liza or an Alexandra
Paulovna could stir the heart of a man
who has constant twinges in his leg. I wonder
if one of our own Yankee girls of the best type,
haughty and spirituelle, would be of any comfort
to you in your present deplorable condition. If
I thought so, I would hasten down to the Surf
House and catch one for you; or, better still,
I would find you one over the way.

Picture to yourself a large white house just
across the road, nearly opposite our cottage. It
is not a house, but a mansion, built, perhaps, in
the colonial period, with rambling extensions, and
gambrel roof, and a wide piazza on three sides, —
a self-possessed, high-bred piece of architecture,
with its nose in the air. It stands back from the
road, and has an obsequious retinue of fringed
elms and oaks and weeping willows. Sometimes
in the morning, and oftener in the afternoon,
when the sun has withdrawn from that part of

the mansion, a young woman appears on the
piazza with some mysterious Penelope web of
embroidery in her hand, or a book. There is a
hammock over there, — of pineapple fibre, it
looks from here. A hammock is very becoming
when one is eighteen, and has golden hair, and
dark eyes, and an emerald-colored illusion dress
looped up after the fashion of a Dresden china
shepherdess, and is chaussée like a belle of the
time of Louis Quatorze. All this splendor goes
into that hammock, and sways there like a pond-lily
in the golden afternoon. The window of
my bedroom looks down on that piazza, — and
so do I.

But enough of this nonsense, which ill becomes
a sedate young attorney taking his vacation
with an invalid father. Drop me a line,
dear Jack, and tell me how you really are. State
your case. Write me a long, quiet letter. If
you are violent or abusive, I'll take the law to
you.