“They are very pretty, some of them,”
said the Woman of the World; “not the sort of
letters I should have written myself.”
“I should like to see a love-letter of yours,”
interrupted the Minor Poet.
“It is very kind of you to say so,” replied
the Woman of the World. “It never occurred
to me that you would care for one.”
“It is what I have always maintained,”
retorted the Minor Poet; “you have never really
understood me.”
“I believe a volume of assorted love-letters
would sell well,” said the Girton Girl; “written
by the same hand, if you like, but to different correspondents
at different periods. To the same person one
is bound, more or less, to repeat oneself.”
“Or from different lovers to the same correspondent,”
suggested the Philosopher. “It would be
interesting to observe the response of various temperaments
exposed to an unvaried influence. It would throw
light on the vexed question whether the qualities that
adorn our beloved are her own, or ours lent to her
for the occasion. Would the same woman be addressed
as ‘My Queen!’ by one correspondent, and
as ‘Dear Popsy Wopsy!’ by another, or would
she to all her lovers be herself?”
“You might try it,” I suggested to the
Woman of the World, “selecting, of course, only
the more interesting.”
“It would cause so much unpleasantness, don’t
you think?” replied the Woman of the World.
“Those I left out would never forgive me.
It is always so with people you forget to invite to
a funeral—they think it is done with deliberate
intention to slight them.”
“The first love-letter I ever wrote,”
said the Minor Poet, “was when I was sixteen.
Her name was Monica; she was the left-hand girl in
the third joint of the crocodile. I have never
known a creature so ethereally beautiful. I
wrote the letter and sealed it, but I could not make
up my mind whether to slip it into her hand when we
passed them, as we usually did on Thursday afternoons,
or to wait for Sunday.”
“There can be no question,” murmured the
Girton Girl abstractedly, “the best time is
just as one is coming out of church. There is
so much confusion; besides, one has one’s Prayer-book—I
beg your pardon.”
“I was saved the trouble of deciding,”
continued the Minor Poet. “On Thursday
her place was occupied by a fat, red-headed girl, who
replied to my look of inquiry with an idiotic laugh,
and on Sunday I searched the Hypatia House pews for
her in vain. I learnt subsequently that she
had been sent home on the previous Wednesday, suddenly.
It appeared that I was not the only one. I left
the letter where I had placed it, at the bottom of
my desk, and in course of time forgot it. Years
later I fell in love really. I sat down to write
her a love-letter that should imprison her as by some
subtle spell. I would weave into it the love
of all the ages. When I had finished it, I read
