ce is not invincible, and I
could learn much by disagreeing with you! Your letters would be antidotal,
and thus, by a sort of mental allopathy, beneficial.

Sincerely,
JESSICA DOANE.

III

PHILIP TO JESSICA

MY DEAR MISS DOANE:

There can be no doubt of it. Your reply, which I should have acknowledged
sooner, gives substance to the self-reproach that came to me the moment my
letter to you was out of my hands. All my friends complain that they can
get nothing from me but "journalistic correspondence"; and now when once I
lay aside the hurry and constraint of the editorial desk to respond to
what seemed a personal demand in a new acquaintance, I quite lose myself
and launch out into a lyrical disquisition which really applies more to my
own experience than to yours. Will you not overlook this fault of egotism?
Indeed I cannot quite promise that, if you receive many letters from me in
the course of your reviewing, you may not have to make allowances more
than once for a note of acrid personality, or egotism, if you please,
welling up through the decorum of my editorial advisings. "If we shut
nature out of the door, she will come in at the window," is an old saying,
and it holds good of newspaper doors and windows, as you see.

But really, what I had in mind, or should have had in mind, was not
the vague question whether you should "sacrifice your life to
literature,"--that question you very properly answered in a tone of
bantering sarcasm; but whether you should sacrifice your present manner of
life to come and seek your fortune in this "literary metropolis"--Heaven
save the mark! Let me say flatly, if I have not already said it, there is
no literature in New York. There are millions of books manufactured
here, and millions of them sold; but of literature the city has no
sense--or has indeed only contempt. Some day I may try to explain what
I mean by this sharp distinction between the making of books, or even the
love of books, and the genuine aspiration of literature. The
distinction is as real to my mind--has proved as lamentably real in my
actual experience--as that conceived in the Middle Ages between the
life of a _religiosus_, Thomas a Kempis, let us say, and of a faithful
man of the world. But this is a mystery, and I will not trouble you
with mysteries or personal experiences. You would