And right by the tower-door is a big statue of St. Nicholas of Bari, in his episcopal robes, and hopping around his feet are two little bits of babies he saved and brought back to life after they’d been cut up and pickled. Very nice! You’d like it! Pray to St. Nicholas for me, and to St. Stephen, St. Brigid, St. Michael, St. Christopher, St. Joseph, St. Anthony of Padua, St. Teresa, and all our other good friends in Heaven, and love me. JOYCE. * * * * * April 21, 1918. Dear Aline: I am glad of the auspicious beginning of Eleanor’s romance. I would so regard it, for I cannot understand the interpretation which makes marriage the termination instead of the beginning of a splendid adventure. If there should ever be the perfect novel of love, it would begin rather than end “And they were married.” Would the phrase continue: “And lived happily ever after”? I doubt it--but that depends upon the definition of happiness. I know that you dislike the symbolism which is the basis of Coventry Patmore’s greatest poems, but I think you will admit that there is this truth in his idea--the relationship of man and wife is like that of God and the soul in that it must be purified and strengthened by suffering. Also--to put it on a lower plane--Eleanor is enough of a poet to take some enjoyment out of being the wife of a soldier gone to the wars--or Irish enough, which is the same thing. As to the matter of my own blood (you mentioned this in a previous letter) I did indeed tell a good friend of mine who edits the book-review page of a Chicago paper that I was “half Irish.” But I have never been a mathematician. The point I wished to make was that a large percentage--which I have a perfect right to call half--of my ancestry was Irish. For proof of this, you have only to refer to the volumes containing the histories of my mother’s and my father’s families. Of course I am American, but one cannot be pure American in blood unless one is an Indian. And I have the good fortune to be able to claim, largely because of the wise matrimonial selections of my progenitors on both sides, Irish blood. And don’t let anyone publish a statement contradictory to this.