Dear Enemy

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.