lar individual whom, having once named, I need not
name again.

"Do you suppose all this can be a sort of vanity? Do you think it was
my delight in the sound of my own voice, booming through the crowded
streets I love like the bittern across his lonely marshes, that makes
me wish you would abandon even such thrilling traffic as trousseau
planning, and come back and let me boom some more? For I have found it
truth absolute that New York with Miss Maitland in it is a better place
than the same city peopled only by Richard Smith--and some millions of
others. Do you object to my telling you this? If your mood is
unusually Bostonian when you receive this letter, you will very likely
hurl the fragments of it into an ashcan omitted from the map of the
brown building on Deerfield Street. However, I am counting heavily on
the mood and influence of the approaching wedding to help me out.

"For nobody--that is, no real girl--is inflexible when there is a
wedding in the air, and your letter only proves you are a real
girl--which I always thought you to be. And I'm awfully glad you are!
Only think how icily unhuman you would seem if you could hold yourself
superior even to a wedding, and especially to one so romantic as this
of Miss Hurd's promises to be, with all the melodramatic settings of a
possible elopement, a distracted mother, and the thunderously raging
paternal parent of the disinherited heiress to add zest to the
occasion! If you remained unmelted by all this, my next visit to
Boston--which I am sorry to say cannot occur as soon as I would like to
have it--would almost certainly see my calls confined to insurance
agents and lawyers--or perhaps to the mythical other person referred to
in your letter.

"For the other person is purely mythical, as you must some day know.
Only in Deerfield Street is there the type of brown building that
irresistibly attracts me. So beware of stray rings at the doorbell,
for any moment it may be I. Do you believe in telepathy? And if so,
do you believe in it sufficiently to think it can ring a doorbell all
the way from New York to Boston? If you do, listen--and you can hear
it now!

"You asked me about the onslaught upon the octopus, and I am happy to
say that things are going as well as the most ardent muck-raker on the
most active fifteen-cent reform magazine could wish. The suit has been
put on the calendar for trial in Massachusetts, and in New York State
the Superintenden