Page:I, Mary MacLane (1917).pdf/93

 a lead-pencil—beautifully he sharpened it—for me to write a telegram with. It was not until this correspondence that we established an unreliable intimacy. But to be told I seemed a weir-woman to a hard-headed business man who could doubtless cheat a client out of four thousand dollars easily in a half-day's maneuvering is oddly inspiriting.

And he tells me he is highly privileged to be permitted to gaze in at the mezzo-tinted windows of my soul, which are surely curtained against the passing proletariat.

Which is another lie. He has never remotely glimpsed my tired Soul in the firmly false little letters I've written him. As to its being a privilege if he had: it is the proletariat, it so happens, who have first chance at those windows, which are not mezzo-tinted but made of the plainest of plain glass. But the conceit tastes mellow and naïf and bromidic and appetizing to me, like cream and raspberries in July.

And he tells me the most delightful thing in the world would be to live near me and have a season of daily meetings—meetings of astral selves upon a 'higher plane' whereon we should exchange those flowers and fruits of the spirit which grow not from the soils but from the esoteric essences of life:—that sort of thing.