to me that he would help me to get
back into the sunlight. He said the first thing I must do to regain
self-confidence was to begin driving again. I told him I could not, but
he said I must, and made me take the driver's seat of a car I had
never seen and take the steering wheel of a make of machine I had never
driven, and tackle two or three serious problems for a driver. I did it
all right, Linda, because I couldn't allow myself to fail the kind of a
man Mr. Snow is, when he was truly trying to help me, but in the depths
of my heart I am afraid I am a coward forever, for there is a ghastly
illness takes possession of me as I write these details to you. But
anyway, put a red mark on your calendar beside the date on which you
get this letter, and joyfully say to yourself that Marian has found two
real, sympathetic friends.

In a week or ten days I shall know about the contest. If I win, as I
really have a sneaking hope that I shall, since I have condensed the
best of two dozen houses into one and exhausted my imagination on
my dream home, I will surely telegraph, and you can make it a day of
jubilee. If I fail, I will try to find out where my dream was not true
and what can be done to make it materialize properly; but between us,
Linda girl, I am going to be dreadfully disappointed. I could use the
material value that prize represents. I could start my life work which
I hope to do in Lilac Valley on the prestige and the background that it
would give me. I don't know, Linda, whether you ever learned to pray
or not, but I have, and it's a thing that helps when the black
shadow comes, when you reach the land of "benefits forgot and friends
remembered not."

And this reminds me that I should not write to my very dearest friend
who has her own problems and make her heart sad with mine; so to the
joyful news of my two friends add a third, Linda, for I am going to tell
you a secret because it will make you happy. Since I have been in San
Francisco some man, who for a reason of his own does not tell me his
name, has been writing me extremely attractive letters. I have had
several of them and I can't tell you, Linda, what they mean to me or
how they help me. There is a touch of whimsy about them. I can't as
yet connect them with anybody I ever met, but to me they are taking the
place of a little lunch on the bread of life. They are such real, such
vivid, such alive letters from such a real person that I have been
doing the ver