The Jessica Letters: An Editor's RomanceHarris, Corra
General
The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance
Harris, Corra
Editors -- Fiction
You have not wrote to me yet. The weather is fine and things come up here
and bloom out doors. But the old gentleman says we are out of the ark of
safety. He have made up his mind to be damned any how. He says the Lord
have turned his face against us. But I guess really it is the young lady
that is showing off. She stands on her hind legs 'most all the time now.
She have back slid out of nearly everything and have quit going to church.
She does the same kind of meanness I do now, and don't care. She is jolly
all the time, but she aint really glad none. She have got a familiar
spirit in the forest that you can't see with your eyes. But she meets him
under a big tree, and sometimes she cries. She don't let me come, but I
creep after her and hide, so as to be there if he changes her into
something else. The old gentleman have quit his religious cussing now and
have took to fussing. But he can do either one according to the bible. He
knows all the abusing scripture by heart. But the young lady have hardened
her heart. She is dead game, and she aint skert of him, nor of the bible,
nor nothing. And she aint sweet to nobody now but me. If you answer this,
I will show it to her.
Your trew friend,
JACK O'MEARA.
P.S.--She wore your letter all one day inside her things before she give
it to the old man.
LI
FROM PHILIP'S DIARY
Humanitarians are divided into two classes--those who have no imagination,
and those who have a perverted imagination. The first are the
sentimentalists; their brains are flaccid, lumpish like dough, and without
grip on reality. They are haunted by the vague pathos of humanity, and,
being unable to visualise human life as it is actually or ideally, they
surrender themselves to indiscriminate pity, doing a little good thereby
and a vast deal of harm. The second class includes the theoretical
socialists and other regenerators of society whose imagination has been
perverted by crude vapours and false visions. They are ignorant of the
real springs of human action; they have wilfully turned their faces away
from the truth as it exists, and their punishment is to dwell in a
fantastic dream of their own creating which works a madness in the brain.
They are to-day what the religious fanatics were in the Middle Ages,
having merely substituted a paradise on this earth for the old paradise in
the heavens. They are as cruel and intolerant as the inquisitors, though
they mask themselves in formulae of universal brotherhood.
LII
FROM PHILIP'S DIARY
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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