face lost in a tulle
abyss. She lives just a whisper away from me--so strange I haven't seen
her before. She's trotting around with a Sioux Falls fellow who looks
like a Dutch luncheon favor. Every time he lifts his hat I look for
bon-bons to drop out. Says she must be loving someone all the time, even
if she is considered in the light of an accommodation train. She's the
unfinished sort of a woman who carries her beauty around in little tubes
and seems so used to audiences that I always feel that she must have
sung between the acts.

_Town Topics_ said something about "The soft breezes of California
restoring the bloom to Phyllis' cheeks"--to think that _T. Ts_ got
fogged in the matter is consoling to such lesser lights as you and I.
You can take it from me, "the soft breezes of California" are blowing
into her room in a nearby Sioux Falls boarding house, but instead of
being laden with the scent of flowers they are redolent of hash from the
cookery. I'll take off my hat to her. She was a slick duck. Of course
she denied nothing to me--her time is up soon; then she will lay her
history before the Judge, who is always busy picking hairs from his
coat and doing other things of vital import while you pour out your
heart's woes.

The fellow whose motor sent me to the brink of the Styx, is now
preparing me by night light to take the 33d degree of happiness. You
have heard of him I know, Carlton Somerville, the Wall Street broker. I
forget what it was his wife did that got on his nerves, but anyway he
too is hibernating in Sioux Falls clay. We have gotten "First-namey" and
have frankly decided that in order to keep our cleverness from dying of
inanition, we will practice on each other.

How could you, my dearest friend, accuse me of being forgetful of Bern?
He wouldn't appreciate me at all if I forgot how. And really six months
of non-practice would be ruination.

Carlton has fallen in love over his depth with that beefy Mrs. Claymore
and takes me motoring to pour his love (of her) into my aural
labyrinths. I don't object to playing second fiddle, but when it comes
to holding the triangle for the drummer, I pass blind. Never mind, while
he isn't watching some day he'll get stung, for I'm really fond of him.
You say that you are so much stronger willed than I am--did you ever
look at yourself in the mirror? Carlton has eyes that I adore--they are
the deeply sad sort that would make one think that love had passed that
way