Well, I am weak, you see, just as weak and silly as the very weakest and silliest in spite of my big words and brave face. I am writing now as near the stove as possible in Papa's room, glad to be with him, glad to be warm, grateful to sit with somebody alive after that hour with the ghosts; and the result of deep considering has been to force me to face the fact that there is much meanness in my nature. There is. Don't bother to contradict; there is. All my forlornness since yesterday is simply the outcome of a mixture of envy and self-pity. I do miss dear Vicki whom I greatly loved, I do miss the cheery Joey, I miss Papa Lindeberg who likened me to Hebe, I miss his wife who kept me in my proper place--it is quite true that I miss these people, but that would never of itself be a feeling strong enough to sweep me off my feet into black pools of misery as I was swept this afternoon, and never, never would make me, who have so fine a contempt for easy tears, cry. No, Mr. Anstruther, bitter truths once seen have to be stared at squarely, and I am simply comparing my lot with Vicki's and being sorry for myself. It is amazing that it should be so, for have I not everything a reasonable being needs, and am I not, then, a reasonable being? And the meanness of it; for it does imply a grudging, an uneasiness in the presence of somebody else's happiness. Well, I'm thoroughly ashamed, and that at least is a good thing; and now that you know how badly I too need lecturing and how I am torn by particularly ungenerous emotions perhaps you'll see what a worthless person I am and will take me down from the absurd high pinnacle on which you persist in keeping me and on which I have felt so desperately uncomfortable for months past. It is infinitely humiliating, I do assure you, to be--shall we say venerated? for excellences one would like to possess but is most keenly aware one does not. Persons with any tendency to be honest about themselves and with even the smallest grain of a sense of humor should never be chosen as idols and set up aloft in giddy places. They make shockingly bad idols. They are divided by a desire to laugh and an immense pity for the venerator. I add these observations, dear friend, to the description of my real nature that has gone before because your letters are turning more and more into the sort of letters that ends a placid friendship. I want to be placid. I love being placid. I insist on being placid. And the thought of your letters with so little placidness about them, was with me this afternoon in that terrible house, and it added to the fear of the future that seized me by the throat and would not let me go. Is it, then, so impossible to be friends, just friends with a man, in the same dear frank way one is with another woman, or a man is with a man? I hoped you and I were going to prove the possibility triumphantly. I even, so keenly do I desire it, prayed that we were. But perhaps there is little use in such praying.