CHAPTER I
"They are very pretty, some of them," said the Woman of the World;
"not the sort of letters I should have written myself."
"I should like to see a love-letter of yours," interrupted the Minor Poet.
"It is very kind of you to say so," replied the Woman of the World. "It
never occurred to me that you would care for one."
"It is what I have always maintained," retorted the Minor Poet; "you
have never really understood me."
"I believe a volume of assorted love-letters would sell well," said the
Girton Girl; "written by the same hand, if you like, but to different
correspondents at different periods. To the same person one is bound,
more or less, to repeat oneself."
"Or from different lovers to the same correspondent," suggested the
Philosopher. "It would be interesting to observe the response of various
temperaments exposed to an unvaried influence. It would throw light on
the vexed question whether the qualities that adorn our beloved are her
own, or ours lent to her for the occasion. Would the same woman be
addressed as \'My Queen!\' by one correspondent, and as \'Dear Popsy
Wopsy!\' by another, or would she to all her lovers be herself?"
"You might try it," I suggested to the Woman of the World, "selecting,
of course, only the more interesting."
"It would cause so much unpleasantness, don\'t you think?" replied the
Woman of the World. "Those I left out would never forgive me. It is
always so with people you forget to invite to a funeral--they think it is
done with deliberate intention to slight them."
"The first love-letter I ever wrote," said the Minor Poet, "was when I
was sixteen. Her name was Monica; she was the left-hand girl in the
third joint of the crocodile. I have never known a creature so ethereally
beautiful. I wrote the letter and sealed it, but I could not make up my
mind whether to slip it into her hand when we passed them, as we usually
did on Thursday afternoons, or to wait for Sunday."