"But what I'm doing, Jimmy, is just what you've set out to do--I'm trying not to be lopsided. You've met life as it is, already; I never have. And I'd so love to moon along pleasantly on Ambo's inherited money--read books and write verses and look at flowers and cats and stars and trees and children and cows and chickens and funny dogs and donkeys and funnier women and men! I'd so like not to adjust myself to an industrial civilization; not to worry over that sort of thing at all; above everything, not to earn my daily bread. I could cry about having to make up my mind on such bristly beasts as economic or social problems!
"The class struggle bores me to tears--yet here it is, we're up against it; and I _won't_ be lopsided! What I want is pure thick cream, daintily fed to me, too, from a hand-beaten spoon. So I mustn't have it unless I can get it. And I don't know that I can--you see, it isn't all conscience that's driving me; curiosity's at work as well! But it's scrumptious to know we're both studying the same thing in a different way--the one great subject, after all: How not to be lopsided! How to be perfectly spherical, like the old man in the nonsense rhyme. Not wobbly on one's axis--not even slightly flattened at the poles!"
"But I'm gladdest of all that you and Ambo are beginning at last to be friends. You don't either of you say so--it drifts through; and I could sing about it--if I could sing. There isn't anybody in the world like Ambo.
"As for Sister and me, we're getting on, and we're not. Sister thinks I've done marvels; I know she has. Marvels of economy and taste in cozying up our room, marvels of sympathy and canny advice that doesn't sound like advice at all. As one-half of a mutual-admiration syndicate I'm a complete success! But as a professional author--hum, hum. Anyway, I'm beginning to poke my inquisitive nose into a little of everything, and you can't tell--something, some day, may come of this. As the Dickens man said--who was he?--I hope it mayn't be human gore. Meanwhile, one thing hits the most casual eye: We're still in the double-room-with-alcove boarding-house stage, and likely to stay there for some time to come."
"Your short letter answering my long one has been read and reread and read again. I know it by heart. Everything you say's true--and isn't. I'll try to explain that--for I can't bear you to be doubting me. You are, Phil. I don't blame you, but I do blame myself--for complacency. I've taken too much for granted, as I always do with you and Ambo. You see, I know so intensely that you and Ambo are pure gold--incorruptible!--that I couldn't possibly question anything you might say or do--the fineness of the motive, I mean. If you did murder and were hanged for it, and even if I'd no clue as to why you struck--I should know all the time you must have done it because, for some concealed reason, under circumstances dark to the rest of us, your clear eyes marked it as the one possible right thing to do.