The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Indiscreet Letter, by Eleanor Hallowell
Abbott

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Title: The Indiscreet Letter

Author: Eleanor Hallowell Abbott

Release Date: April 29, 2005 [eBook #15728]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)

***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE INDISCREET LETTER***

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THE INDISCREET LETTER

by

ELEANOR HALLOWELL ABBOTT

Author of _Molly Make Believe_, _The Sick-A-Bed Lady_, etc., etc.

New York
The Century Co.

1915

THE INDISCREET LETTER

The Railroad Journey was very long and slow. The Traveling Salesman
was rather short and quick. And the Young Electrician who lolled
across the car aisle was neither one length nor another, but most
inordinately flexible, like a suit of chain armor.

More than being short and quick, the Traveling Salesman was distinctly
fat and unmistakably dressy in an ostentatiously new and pure-looking
buff-colored suit, and across the top of the shiny black sample-case
that spanned his knees he sorted and re-sorted with infinite
earnestness a large and varied consignment of "Ladies' Pink and Blue
Ribbed Undervests." Surely no other man in the whole southward-bound
Canadian train could have been at once so ingenuous and so nonchalant.

There was nothing dressy, however, about the Young Electrician. From
his huge cowhide boots to the lead smouch that ran from his rough,
square chin to the very edge of his astonishingly blond curls, he was
one delicious mess of toil and old clothes and smiling, blue-eyed
indifference. And every time that he shrugged his shoulders or crossed
his knees he jingled and jangled incongruously among his coil-boxes
and insulators, like some splendid young Viking of old, half blacked
up for a modern minstrel show.

More than being absurdly blond and absurdly messy, the Young
Electrician had one of those extraordinarily sweet, extraordinarily
vital, strangely mysterious, utterly unexplainable masculine faces
that fill your senses with an odd, impersonal disquietude, an itching
unrest, like the hazy, teasing reminder of som