Muetterchen, dearest, I feel like that green hunter you had to sell last spring--the one that would go at a fence with the most perfect display of serious intentions, and then balk and bolt when it came to jumping. Can it be that I, who have been trained from the cradle to the idea of marrying for money, will bolt the gate after all the expense and pains lavished upon my education to this end; after the years spent in learning how to enchant, subdue, and exploit the most useful of all animals, and the most agreeable, barring a few? And yet, right when I'm the fittest--twenty-four years old, knowing all my good points and just how to coerce the most admiration for each, able nicely to calculate the exact disturbing effect of the _ensemble_ upon any poor male, and feeling confident of my excessively eligible _parti_ when I decide for him--in this situation, striven for so earnestly, I feel like bolting the bars. How my trainer and jockey would weep tears of rage and despair if they guessed it! There, there--I know your shrewd grey eyes are crackling with curiosity and, you want to know what it's all about, whether to scold me or mother me, and will I please omit the _entrees_ and get to the roast mutton. But you dear, dear old aunt, you, there is more vagueness than detail, and I know I'll strain your patience before I've done. But, to relieve your mind, nothing at all has really happened. After all, it's mostly a _troublesome state of mind_, that I shall doubtless find gone when we reach Jersey City,--and in two ways this Western trip is responsible for it. Do you know the journey itself has been fascinating. Too bad so many of us cross the ocean twenty times before we know anything of this country. We loiter in Paris, do the stupid German watering-places, the Norway fjords, down to Italy for the museums, see the _chateaux_ of the Loire, or do the English race-tracks, thinking we're 'mused; and all the time out here where the sun goes down is an intensely interesting and beautiful country of our own that we overlook. You know I'd never before been even as far as Chicago. Now for the first time I can appreciate lots of those things in Whitman, that-- "I think heroic deeds were all conceived in the open air, and free poems, also. Now I see the secret of making the best persons: It is to grow in the open air and to eat and sleep with the earth."