So much, then, for my own broad annotation of Susan's letter to Phil! But I leave you with generalizations, when your interest is in concrete fact. Patience. In my too fumbling way I am ready for you there, as well. VI SUSAN TO JIMMY "I suppose you'd really like to know what I've lately been up to; but I hardly know myself. It's absurd, of course, but I almost think I'm having a weeny little fit of the blues to-night--not dark-blue devils exactly--say, light-blue gnomes! I hate being pushed about, and things have pushed me about, rather. It's that, I think. There's been too much--of everything--somehow---- "You see, my social life just now is divided into three parts, like all Gaul, and as my business opportunities--Midas forgive them!--have all come out of my social contacts, I'll have to begin with them. Maltby's the golden key to the first part; Mr. Heywood Sampson, the great old-school publisher and editor-author, is the iron key to the second; and chance--our settling down here on the fringes of Greenwich Village--is the skeleton key to the third. "I seem to be getting all Gaul mixed up with Bluebeard's closets and things, but I'll try to straighten my kinky metaphors out for you, Jimmy, if it takes me all night. But I assume you're more or less up to date on me, since I find you all most brazenly hand me round, and since I wrote Phil--and got severely scolded in return; deserved it, too--all about Maltby's patiently snubbing me as a starving author and impatiently rushing me as a possible member for his Emancipated Order of Æsthetic May-Flies--I call it his, for he certainly thinks of it that way. Now--Maltby and I have not precisely quarreled, but the north wind doth blow and we've already had snow enough to cool his enthusiasm. The whole thing's unpleasant; but I've learned something. Result--my occasional flutterings among the Æsthetic May-Flies grow beautifully less. They'd cease altogether if I hadn't made friends--to call them that--with a May-Fly or two. "One of them's the novelist, Clifton Young, a May-Fly at heart--but there's a strain of Honeybee in his blood somewhere. It's an unhappy combination--all the talents and few of the virtues; but I like him in spite of himself. For one thing, he doesn't pose; and he can _write_! He's a lost soul, though--thinks life is a tragic farce. Almost all the May-Flies try to think that; it's a sort of guaranty of the last sophistication; but it's genuine with Clifton, he must have been born thinking it. He doesn't ask for sympathy, either; if he did, I couldn't pity him--and get jeered at wittily for my pains!