dy some day. I have the advantage of coming upon
them suddenly for the first time, with an absolute unbiased mind, which
like the Bellman's chart in "The Hunting of the Snark" is "a perfect and
absolute blank."

I know I shall go mad before the six months are up, for after ten days,
I am down-down deep in a bog of melancholy, and so bored that I feel
like the president of the gimlet club.

My stomach like nature abhors a vacuum, so me to the strangled eggs and
baked spuds which are our unfailing morning diet.

In the name of Charity, send me messages from the world I love.

Devotedly,
MARIANNE.

Dearest Lorna:

There's an old maid here (Heaven knows she's out of place) who wears her
hair in one of those "tied for life knots," and she comes tip-toeing to
my room each night to ask me if I think she'll ever get a man. Because
I've had one, and am making something that resembles a trousseau, she
thinks that I have a recipe for cornering the male market. Her dental
arch is like the porte-cochere of the new Belmont Hotel, and last night
a precocious four-year-old said, "Miss Mandy, why don't you tuck your
teeth in?"--Miss Mandy would if she could but she can't. She is the sort
who would stop her own funeral to sew up a hole in her shroud.

The moonlight nights here are a perfect irritation, and I really think
this moon isn't half as calloused to demonstration as our dear old New
York moon. There are so few men here that the female congregation is
getting terribly out of practice.

I have found out lately that our attorneys out here rob us of everything
and politely allow us to keep the balance.

My abode of virtue is filled with furniture from the vintage of the
early forties and I sit in it alone and am so pathetically good, that I
am beginning to suspect myself.

You know I was born when I was very young and have been desperately tidy
about my morals ever since, but for fear of stumbling just because I'm
so bored I have entrenched myself behind a maddening routine. Six months
here ought to put ballast into the brain of the silliest.

I think that marriage has become a social atrophy, and I never want to
be guilty of irrevocably skewering two hearts together.

I fear myself only when I'm bored. Eve never would have flirted with the
snake if Adam hadn't got on her nerves. I always could resist everything
but temptation.

Bern once told m