National Avenue by Booth Tarkington (book recommendations website .txt) 📕

spend a great deal of time over that Ornaby thing. Is it really so beautifully interesting as you say it is? Of course I do understand you’re immensely keen on it though, and I’m glad it will be such a great success and all that. I certainly hope it will because as I warned you I’m an extravagant little wretch and always in a row with papa about it. But I do hope you don’t feel you’ll have to spend lots of time out there after we’re married. Of course we must be as practical⁠—disgusting word!⁠—as we can, but I do hope you’ll arrange so that you won’t need to do more out West than just oversee this Ornaby affair for a week or so every year, because I adore you and I’ll want you to be with me all the time.

Cousin Oliver has some works⁠—I don’t know what it is they make but I think it’s metal things for plumbers or something equally heinous!⁠—and his works are out in the West somewhere, too. He only has to go there once or twice a year and gets home again the next night. I do hope you’ll be sure to make arrangements like that about yours. At any rate, be sure not to have to go out there next year, not unless you just hate your poor Me! I couldn’t bear for anything to interfere with our having a full year abroad. I won’t let you leave me in Nice or Mentone and run back to your old Ornaby thing for weeks and weeks! If you dare to try anything like that, sir, I’ll flirt my little head off with some dashing maître d’hôtel! Write instantly and tell me nothing shall spoil our full year abroad together. Instantly! Or I’ll think you hate me!

This letter gave Dan a bad hour as he sat in his room at home trying to construct a reply to it. The full year abroad now considered so definite by Lena had been rather sketchily mentioned between them in New York; he had agreed, with a faint and concealed uneasiness, that a wedding journey to southern France, if he could “manage” it, would be lovely; but afterwards he had forgotten all about it; and, being in his twenties, he was yet to learn how often the casual implications of men in their tender moments are construed by women to be attested bonds, sworn to, signed and sealed. So now, as he answered Lena, he found himself on the defensive, as if the impossibility of the full year abroad were a wrong to her, an unintended one, but nevertheless a wrong for him to explain and for her to forgive. He added to his opening explanations:

We might go to Europe two or three years from now. Of course I don’t expect to make the Addition my life work. I hope to be going into other things as soon as I’ve put this on its own feet. You show you’ve got a wonderful business head in your letter, dear, because a man’s business ought to be just the way you say⁠—it ought to be so he only needs to oversee it. The broad principles of business aren’t often understood by a woman, and it makes me proud that you are one of the few who can. You do understand them so well I see it must be my own fault I haven’t given you the right idea about Ornaby Addition. For one thing, you see, an addition isn’t a works exactly, though not as unlike as it might seem, because both need a great deal of attention and energy to get them started. What I am trying to do is to lay out an Addition to the city, making streets and building lots that afterwhile will become part of the city, and my land won’t be really an addition until that is accomplished. It is a wonderful piece of land, with superb trees and good clean air, though I have to cut down many of the trees, which I hate to do, in order to lay out the building lots.

What troubles me so much since reading your last letter is that I don’t see any way to leave here at all, except for a few days for our wedding and a stop at Niagara Falls if you would like that⁠—it is a sight you ought to see, dear, and well worth the time⁠—on our way here. I’m afraid I didn’t think enough about the trip abroad when we spoke of it and didn’t fully understand it was a settled thing, as you do. That is all my fault and I’m going to be mighty sorry if this is a big disappointment to you. I would sooner cut off my right hand than let anything be a disappointment to you, Lena, and I don’t know just how it happened that I didn’t know before how much you were counting on spending the year in Europe.

Another thing that hurts me and I hardly know how to speak of it is this: I ought to have consulted you before I plunged into this work⁠—I see that now⁠—but I got so enthusiastic over it I just went ahead, and now it’s impossible for me not to keep on going ahead with it, and that means we have to live here, Lena. I did hope to persuade you to be willing for us to live here, but I only hoped to persuade you to it, and now I’m afraid this may look to you as if I forced it on you. That would just break my heart, to have you believe it, and I never thought of such an aspect when I bought the Ornaby farm. I just thought it would be a big thing and make us a fortune and help build up my city. But now it’s done and all my money’s tied up in it, we’ll have to settle down