bags of items,
where you have to elucidate, weigh, and use your judgment whether more
(or less) is meant than meets the eye; and after whose perusal you are
left for hours, sometimes days, patching together suggestions and
wondering what they suggest. Some persons' letters seem almost framed
to afford a series of _alibis_ for their personality; not in this thing,
oh no! not concerned in such a matter by any means; always elsewhere,
never to be clutched.

Yet there are bitterer things in letters from friends than even these,
which merely puzzle and distress, but do not infuriate. For I feel
cheated by casual glimpses of affairs which concern me not; I resent odd
scraps of information, not chosen for my palate; I am indignant at news
culled from the public prints, and frantic at thermometric and
meteorological intelligence. But stay! There is a case when what seems
to come under this heading is really intensely personal, and, therefore,
most welcome to the letter receiver. I mean whenever, as happens with
some persons, such talk about the weather reveals the real writing soul
in its most intimate aspect; wrestling with hated fogs, or prone in the
dampish heat, fretted by winds or jubilant in dry, sunny air. And now I
find that with this item of weather reports, I am emerging from the
region of letters I abhor into the region of letters which I love, or
which I lovingly grieve over for some small minor cruelty.

For I am grieved--nay, something more--by that extraordinary (and I
hope exclusively feminine) fact an absence of superscripture. My soul
claims some kind of vocative. I would accept a German note of
exclamation; I would content myself with an Italian abbreviation, a
Preg^mo, or Chiar^mo; I could be happy with a solemn and discreet
French "Madame et chere amie," or (as may happen) "Monsieur et cher
Maitre," like the bow with tight-joined heels and _platbord_ hat
pressed on to waistcoat, preluding delightful conversation. But not to
be quite sure how one is thought of! Whether as _dear_, or _my dear_,
or Tom, Dick, or Harry, or soldier, or sailor, or candlestick maker!
Nay, at the first glance, not quite to know whether one is the
destined reader, or whether even there is a destined reader at all; to
be offered an entry out of a pocket-book, a page out of a diary, a
selection of _Pensees_, were they Pascal's; a soliloquy, were it
Hamlet's: surely lack of sympathy can go no further, nor incapacity of
effort be more