I am sending off letters to our workers, begging them to hasten their wares to us, telling them the demand for their work is here. All we need is the goods.
No, I don’t go anywhere. Do you wish I would? When I first came home people began giving me teas and all that, but I begged them not to.
“Come and see me Sunday afternoons,” I told them. “I mustn’t indulge in a social life. I wouldn’t have time and strength for that along with all my work.”
I knew the people who really cared for me would come, and as for the others, it would be better for them to visit their chosen friends and not bother with me.
Well, why don’t you come to visit me and to help me with the Christmas trade? Wouldn’t it be the joy of the world to see the exclusive Miss Delight Ravanel waiting on people and wearing a pleasant saleslady’s smile? It would fill me with great glee. Please come down here and let me see you doing it.
Do you miss me? I miss you very, very much. Evenings, when I leave the drawing-room and go up to my own quiet room, I think of you sitting by yourself, so lady-fine and peaceful beside your lamp, your busy needles and thoughts going, and outside the trees sighing and the wind whistling. How still you can be, dear friend. Is it hard to learn to be as still as that?
I have been telling Barbara Summers all about you. Of course she had met you at the time of my coming-out party, but she couldn’t possibly know you—or even guess you—until she had sat with you evening after evening as I have, in so pleasant a “solitude of two” and mined for your treasures of brain and heart. For you hide your virtues as other people do their faults.
Dear Delight R., I have had occasion whenever I went to Mother McBirney’s, to go by the place I used to call mine. I mean that little, out-looking bench on the mountain-side where the tulip trees rustle and the spring of cold water whispers. I have already told you that a house is going up there. Well, it is beginning really to look like a house now, and I cannot resist dismounting every time I pass it, and looking it over.
It is going to be a bewitching house, nothing less. There is a covered porch which in winter is to be made into a sun room, that literally hangs over the blue abyss, but so firmly is it supported with its foundations of cement and its huge beams of oak, that it is as firm and enduring as the mountain-side itself. There is a long, fine living room; the mantel is to be of blue tile—yes, and the chimney piece, too. It will be curious, will it not? But I think I shall like it. There are two bedrooms on the first floor, and there is, of course, the kitchen and a small dining room. The wood is chestnut, which takes on a beautiful color when it is oiled.