Which is another lie. No possible man (except a Poet whom I loved--or perhaps a scientist--) could find me delightful for more than two consecutive meetings--I develop something like temper--and I care for no higher planes except in airships. As for esoterics--I would fainer exchange musings anent over-shoes than over-souls. And my spirit bears in fertile earthy soil chiefly thistles from which men gather no figs. But it gives me a warmish feeling, similar to a hot-water bottle between my shoulders on a winter night, to read that picturesque palaver written to me in my slim scorn by him in his springy swivel chair. Thus it goes. His letters are made all of softest quaintest lies which I know to be lies the moment my gray gaze falls on them. All his premises in regard to me and his deductions from them are roundly lightly mistaken. But I like that fluent flattery the more because it is so false. I am too vain a creature to want to cope often with truths even though they might be uplifting self-lauding truths. My vain peculiar Weakness demands as well semi-occasional collations of creamed lies upon which it feeds like a sleek cat on creamed fish. My humor enters into it, in no obvious way but eerily like a gay ghost. My humor is a strong influence in me. It is stronger than my pride and anger and fear and caution and reverence and self-love--stronger than most things I own. And it’s for reasons of pastime and vanity and oblique humor I let letters from the business man come, though not often, into my solitudes. And I spend hours of inert time-waste conning his fanciful ideas. And the letters I write him in reply, though brief and impersonal and done in my best false manner, consume a surprising lot of time and mental and physical force to write. It is the Weakness in it which is so devouring: it eats me hungrily and lingers about like a buzzard, picking my bones. A spinelessly Weak game. I hate its Weakness more than I like its pleasant futility. I hate it and myself in it all the time I’m dwelling on it. I hate it as I’d hate a little drug habit fastened on my nerves. Its influence is the same but more insidious than a drug would be, more demoralizing. As feeling fear makes one afraid, feeling more fear makes one more afraid. Still once in a month, once in a two-month, I feel the hankering itch to be applauded for second-rate qualities I do not own, and I give way to it: in a particularly Weak way, after my sanest self has reduced it analytically to shreds, and after saying bosh! with all my selves. After telling Me too that it is a common-tasting game. Life is a strange music-clangor of gold bells, some silent, some far-echoing. And the common-tasting thing cracks a bell-edge. Then briskly I answer the last letter from Atlanta-Georgia and soon there comes a fresh sheaf of smooth velvetish lies to pad my way. There may come no more if this I write now should find its way to Atlanta-Georgia. Or if fate or Bertha should intervene.