, I was falling in love. At least, I felt myself slipping. All
these four years I have intended Michael Daragh to be an interesting
character part in my drama of New York, down in the cast as "her best
friend." He is threatening to take the lead, and it isn't going to do
at all. Sally, the man's goodness is simply ghastly; I couldn't
endure having a husband so incontestibly better than I am. Why, you
know that all my life I've been "a wonderful influence for good" with
_man_kind! Didn't I always coax sling shots away from bad little
boys and make them sign up for the S.P.C.A.? And wasn't I always
getting bad big boys to smoke less and drink less and pass ex'es and
dance with wallflowers and write to their mothers? Really, when I
think of the twigs I've bent and the trees I've inclined, I feel that
there should be a tablet erected to me somewhere. But the woman who
weds Michael Daragh, I don't care who she is (lie: I care
enormously!) will always be burning incense to him in her lesser
soul, always straining on tiptoe to breathe the air in which he lives
and moves and has his being.

Michael Daragh, that time he renounced the flesh-pots and "took to
bride the Ladye Povertye with perfect blithenesse," did it so
thoroughly that any literal spouse will be only a sort of morganatic
wife, anyway. I don't mean that he might not adore her and be
wonderful to her _after_ he'd ministered unto a drove of sticky
immigrants and a Settlement full of drab down-and-outs and an Agnes
Chatterton Home full of Fallen Sisters, but he would really expect
her to _prefer_ having him assist at the arrival of the eleventh
little Lascanowitz in a moldy cellar to keeping a birthday dinner
date with her.

Now, Sally dear, in these four years since I left my village home
(soft chords) I have labored somewhat, and I confess that I have
frankly looked forward to matrimony as a sort of glorified vacation.
I couldn't ever give up my work, of course,--it wouldn't give me
up--and I don't crave to "sit on a cushion and sew a fine seam and
live upon strawberries, sugar and cream" exclusively, but somewhere
in the middle ground between that and washing dishes and "feeding the
swine," I did visualize a sort of gracious lady leisure, with a
vague, worshipful being in the background making me "take care of
myself."