You may wonder at this ebullition. Truth is, I'm backing down,
firmly, forcefully, an inclination to do an essay on the
subject. This is the first chance I ever had to express matters
which have come forth from the Miraculous in the past year. All
that she does has the ultimate feminine touch,--but I'll stop
before I get my sleeves up again about this new order of being.
Perhaps you deserve to know Miss Linster. You'd never be the
same afterwards, so I'm not so sure whether I'd better
negotiate it or not. I'm glad to see your book has left the
post so perfectly. Always come to see me when in town. Yours
solid, Reifferscheid.
And so she became the Skylark to Quentin Charter, because she was lost
in the heights over by the seaboard, and only her singing came out of
the blue.... There were fine feminine flashes in the letters Charter
received, rare exquisite matters which can be given to the world, only
through the one who inspires their warm delicacy and charm. The circuit
was complete, and the voltage grew mightier and mightier.
There was a royal fall night, in which Charter's work came ill, because
thoughts of her monopolized. Life seemed warm and splendid within him.
He turned off the electric bulb above his head, and the moonlight burst
in--a hunting moon, full and red as Mars. There was thrilling glory in
the purple south, and a sense of the ineffable majesty of stellar
management. He banished the night panorama with the electric button
again, and wrote to the Skylark. This particular letter proved the kind
which annihilates all sense of separateness, save the animal heaviness
of miles, and makes this last, extra carking and pitiless for the time.
It may have been that Charter would have hesitated to send this letter,
had he read it over again in the cool of morning, but it happened that
he yearned for a walk that night--and passed a mail-box, while the
witchery of the night still enchanted.
He felt dry, a bit burned the next morning, and saddled for a couple of
hours, transferring the slight strain of nerves to his muscles. There
was a note from the Skylark. She had found an old picture of his in a
magazine and commented on it deliciously.... "I wonder if you think of
me as I am--plain, _plain_?" she had asked.... No, he did not. Nor was
it Reifferscheid's words to the contrary that prevented him. It is not
in man to correlate plainness with a mystic attraction. She had never
appeared to him as beautiful exactly, but fine, vivid, electric--a
manifestation of eyes, lips, mind. All the poundage part of a human
being was utterly vague in his concept of the Skylark.... Charter
naturally lost his perspective and penetration in dealing with his own
interlacing emotions.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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