pictures of Miss Jones and Miss Lewis and Miss Thomas and Miss Smith,
for that matter; and so, my dears, if we would be happy we should be
careful even if we can't be good, for it is all for eternity, and
whatever courts may say, and whatever churches may say, and whatever
comes back with rings and letters and trinkets,--there is no divorce,
and the pictures always stay in the heart, and the sum of the pictures
is life.
So that September night Neal Ward went back over the old trail as
lovers always will, and then his pen began to write. Now in the nature
of things the first three words are not for our eyes, and to-night we
must not see the first three lines nor the first thirty, nor the last
three words nor the last three lines nor the last thirty lines. But we
may watch him write; we may observe how longingly he looks at the
telephone, as if tempted to go to it, and tell it what is in his
breast. There it sits, all shiny and metallic; and by conjuring it
with a number and a word, he could have her with him. Yet he does not
take it up; because--the crazy loon thinks in the soul of him, that
what he writes, some way, in the great unknown system of receivers and
recorders and transmitters of thought that range through this
universe, is pouring into her heart, and so he writes and smiles, and
smiles and writes--no bigger fool than half the other lovers on the
planet who, talking to their sweethearts, holding their hands and
looking squarely into their eyes, deceive themselves that what they
say is going to the heart, and not going in one ear and out of the
other.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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