Page:Christopher Morley--Tales from a rolltop desk.djvu/51

 bring an honest pang to an understanding heart; particularly when that heart is in collaboration with twenty-two years of bright, brown-eyed, high-spirited girlhood. Perhaps you don't realize how many of us are young and ignorant and at work in offices, and absorbed, out of working hours, in the universal passion. A good many make shift to be cynical and worldly-wise in public, but who knows how ravishingly sentimental we are in private? Some say that Doctor Freud didn't tell the half of it. As that waggish poet Keith Preston has remarked,

A complex built for two was the ambition of most of Ann's correspondents; but mainly her letters exhibited the seamy side of Love's purple mantle. You see, when lovers are perfectly happy, they don't write to the papers about it. And when she pondered gravely over "Broken-hearted's" letter saying that she has just learned that a perfectly splendid fellow she is So infatuated with has a wife and three children in Detroit; or over "Puzzled's" inquiry as to whether she is "a bum sport" because she wouldn't let