Letters Home. William Dean Howells

      My dear Lincoln:

      I do not want to crowd you with personal intelligence, but I shall not sleep to-night unless I tell someone that I have spent the evening with our old friends, the Ralsons, or rather our young friend, the Ralson.

      The people at Lamarque's would no more think of dressing for dinner than the most exclusive club men of Wottoma (if there were any,) but to-night I had the ambition to see how much a poor young man could dine for at the Walhondia and that was why I was all right as to clothes when I wandered into the glittering banquet hall, and found the Ralsons there. I knew they lived at the Walhondia, and I thought I might stumble on them, but when I did, I was able to give a good imitation of never being so much surprised in my life. The old gentleman had me down at their table in less time than I can tell it; and after dinner, before I knew it, he had me at the theatre with himself and America; and then as suddenly, as things happen in dreams, I was there alone with her. She seemed to think it tremendously exciting, being left with me in their box; and she treated her father's abandoning us, on pretense of seeing a man somewhere after the first act, with a severity that slipped from her in one of those fine, large yawps of hers. She said, " O well, we're all Wottoma innocents together, and nobody knows us, anyway, " and I could pass for her cousin, if not her mother or aunt, or some other elderly relative; and I realized that she was referring to the chaperonage that we are always reading about. After that we proceeded to have a good time, though we put up an icy front, that struck a chill to the beholder, whenever we found people looking at us.

      They looked at us a good deal, and I didn't wonder, for America is certainly beautiful to look at. Of course that hair of hers excites suspicion, but a woman has only got to behave as if she believed a thing was real herself, and she carries conviction. I could see doubt fade from the opera glasses of the observers at the theatre, and from their eyes at supper afterwards (I blew in about five dollars for a few gilded morsels, when we got back to the hotel), as they settled down to perfect faith in her particular rich mahogany shade of hair and gave themselves up to the joy of her sumptuous bloom and bulk, as something that there could never have been any question about. She was the handsomest girl in the theatre and the handsomest in the supper room, and she did not go halfway down her spine to prove it, as some of the women did. I always did think her red, white and blue gorgeousness the richest type of beauty, even when my taste was more for something dark and fine. We got to talking about my taste at the theatre, after we had gone over the novel and the drama (she is more at home in the drama) and I thought it best to make a few careless inquiries about a Certain Person. The beauteous America corresponds with a Certain Person, but she pretended for my comfort that she had not heard from her for some time. She said she had asked a G. P. to visit her, and she put on ignorance enough to enable me to promise that I would be one of a theatre party if the C. P. came.

      She said, when we parted at the door of her apartment, that I need not wait to hear that the C. P. was here before calling, and from this and other things that I have put with it, I infer that the divine America's social progress in New York has not been quite equal to her social ambition. I don't mean that she isn't kind-hearted enough to wish to make it pleasant for me here, but if she had a great many engagements, I doubt if she would have so much time for a country acquaintance. So far, I should think she had seen New York from her hotel, and that is not the best social basis, I imagine. Her hotel is New York, in a certain way, in the way of being a cluster of infinitely repellant particles, as Emerson says, of strangers. But there must be another New York, and I do not believe she has broken into that yet, but this may be because I am so entirely on the outside of it myself. Still I am within guessing distance, and what I guess is that in an old place like this there must be a society so sufficient to itself that it need not be at the pains to be exclusive, and so richly indifferent to what others can bring it that no amount of money can affect its imagination. I have an idea that it might be years before the people of such a society would ever hear of people like the Ralsons. What could people with great-grandfathers in all the old graveyards here, and with family trees to burn, want with the Ralsons? That is what has begun to steal darkly in upon me from the Ralson situation, and I guess that the divine America, who is as sharp as she is beautiful, knows the facts, and it is to her credit that she has not soured on them. She is as jolly as ever she was, and she is just as determined to make her way as if it were open before her. Perhaps it is, and perhaps I am mistaken.

      Perhaps if I lived at the Walhondia I should see things in a different light. I wish on some accounts, if not others, that I did live there, for it is a great world. Simply to sit in the office, and watch the smooth working of the huge machine is to store up impressions for a lifetime. The way the clerks, callboys, and porters operate the arriving and departing guest is so wonderful in itself, that the glimpses of the dining rooms and drawing rooms, and the overdressed women guests trailing through the corridors, with their underdressed men after them, and the he and she New York swells of all sorts and conditions who come in for supper, (like myself!) are naughtinesses of superfluity, embarrassments of riches.

      But I must stop, merely adding that the Ralsons took me to and from the theatre in their electric coupé, and America has just sent me home in it! She wished her best regards to you, Line, and she seems to have a soft place in her spacious heart for all Wottoma.

      Yours ever,

      W. Ardith.