t evening, just as his
tiresome porridge supper was finished.

"Ah, Sweetheart--" said the dainty note tucked inside the
package--"Ah, Sweetheart, the little god of love be praised
for one true lover--Yourself! So it is a picture of _me_
that you want? The _real me_! The _truly me_! No mere pink
and white likeness? No actual proof even of 'seared and
yellow age'? No curly-haired, coquettish attractiveness that
the shampoo-lady and the photograph-man trapped me into for
that one single second? No deceptive profile of the best
side of my face--and I, perhaps, blind in the other eye? Not
even a fair, honest, every-day portrait of my father's and
mother's composite features--but a picture of _myself_!
Hooray for you! A picture, then, not of my physiognomy, but
of my _personality_. Very well, sir. Here is the
portrait--true to the life--in this great, clumsy,
conglomerate package of articles that
represent--perhaps--not even so much the prosy, literal
things that I am, as the much more illuminating and
significant things that _I would like to be_. It's what we
would 'like to be' that really tells most about us, isn't
it, Carl Stanton? The brown that I have to wear talks loudly
enough, for instance, about the color of my complexion, but
the forbidden pink that I most crave whispers infinitely
more intimately concerning the color of my spirit. And as to
my Face--_am I really obliged to have a face_? Oh, no--o!
'Songs without words' are surely the only songs in the world
that are packed to the last lilting note with utterly
limitless meanings. So in these 'letters without faces' I
cast myself quite serenely upon the mercy of your
imagination.

"What's that you say? That I've simply _got_ to have a face?
Oh, darn!--well, do your worst. Conjure up for me then, here
and now, any sort of features whatsoever that please your
fancy. Only, Man of Mine, just remember this in your
imaginings: Gift me with Beauty if you like, or gift me with
Brains, but do not make the crude masculine mistake of
gifting me with both. Thought furrows faces you know, and
after Adolescence only Inanity retains its heavenly
smoothness. Beauty even at its worst is a gorgeously
perfect, flower-sprinkled lawn over which the most ordinary,
every-day errands of