I, too, have noticed for some time that Beverley has been troubled. Have you seen him of late? Have you noticed anything wrong? What do you think of Tilly's letter? Write me at once. I should go to see him myself but for the news from Louisville. I have always thought Beverley health itself. Would it be possible for him to have a breakdown? I shall be wretched about him until I hear from you. What do you make out of the questions Dr. Mullen asked Tilly and her replies? Are you going to write to me every day while I am gone? POLLY. BEN DOOLITTLE TO PHILLIPS & FAULDS _June 4, 1912._ DEAR SIRS: I desire to recall myself to you as a former Louisville patron of your flourishing business and also as more recently the New York lawyer who brought unsuccessful suit against you on behalf of one of his clients. You will find enclosed my cheque, and you are requested to send the value of it in long-stemmed red roses to Miss Boles--the same address as in former years. If the stems of your roses do not happen to be long, make them long. (You know the wires.) Very truly yours, BENJAMIN DOOLITTLE. BEN DOOLITTLE TO POLLY BOLES _June 4, 1912._ DEAR POLLY: You will have had my telegram of sympathy with you in your mother's illness, and of my unspeakable surprise that you could go away without letting me see you. Have I seen Beverley of late? I have seen him early and late. And I have read Tilly's much mystified and much-mistaken letters. If Beverley is crazy, a Kentucky cornfield is crazy, all roast beef is a lunatic, every Irish potato has a screw loose and the Atlantic Ocean is badly balanced. I happen to hold the key to Beverley's comic behaviour in Tilly's parlour. As to the questions put to Tilly by that dilution of all fools, Claude Mullen--your favourite nerve specialist and former suitor--I have just this to say: All these mutterings of Beverley--during one of the gambols in Tilly's parlours, which he naturally reserves for me--all these fragmentary expressions relate to real people and to actual things that you and Tilly have never known anything about. Men must not bother their women by telling them everything. That, by the way, has been an old bone of contention between you and me, Polly, my chosen rib--a silent bone, but still sometimes, I fear, a slightly rheumatic bone. But when will a woman learn that her heavenly charm to a man lies in the thought that he can place her and keep her in a world, into which his troubles cannot come. Thus he escapes from them himself. Let him once tell his troubles to her and she becomes the mirror of them--and possibly the worst kind of mirror. Beverley has told Tilly nothing of all this entanglement with ferns, I have not told you. All four of us have thereby been the happier.