Page:The Bet and Other Stories.djvu/55

Rh with her a lot of money, a bagful of rainbow hopes, and some very high-class views on the business.

Her first letters on the journey were wonderful. When I read them I was simply amazed that little sheets of paper could contain so much youth, such transparent purity, such divine innocence, and at the same time so many subtle, sensible judgments, that would do honour to a sound masculine intelligence. The Volga, nature, the towns she visited, her friends, her successes and failures—she did not write about them, she sang. Every line breathed the confidence which I used to see in her face; and with all this a mass of grammatical mistakes and hardly a single stop.

Scarce six months passed before I received a highly poetical enthusiastic letter, beginning, "I have fallen in love." She enclosed a photograph of a young man with a clean-shaven face, in a broad-brimmed hat, with a plaid thrown over his shoulders. The next letters were just as splendid, but stops already began to appear and the grammatical mistakes to vanish. They had a strong masculine scent. Katy began to write about what a good thing it would be to build a big theatre somewhere in the Volga, but on a cooperative basis, and to attract the rich business-men and shipowners to the undertaking. There would be plenty of money, huge receipts, and the actors would work in partnership. . . . Perhaps all this is really a good thing,