[Illustration]

There are a great many people who really believe in answering letters
the day they are received, just as there are people who go to the movies
at 9 o'clock in the morning; but these people are stunted and queer.

It is a great mistake. Such crass and breathless promptness takes away a
great deal of the pleasure of correspondence.

The psychological didoes involved in receiving letters and making up
one's mind to answer them are very complex. If the tangled process could
be clearly analyzed and its component involutions isolated for
inspection we might reach a clearer comprehension of that curious bag of
tricks, the efficient Masculine Mind.

Take Bill F., for instance, a man so delightful that even to
contemplate his existence puts us in good humor and makes us think well
of a world that can exhibit an individual equally comely in mind, body
and estate. Every now and then we get a letter from Bill, and
immediately we pass into a kind of trance, in which our mind rapidly
enunciates the ideas, thoughts, surmises and contradictions that we
would like to write to him in reply. We think what fun it would be to
sit right down and churn the ink-well, spreading speculation and
cynicism over a number of sheets of foolscap to be wafted Billward.

Sternly we repress the impulse for we know that the shock to Bill of
getting so immediate a retort would surely unhinge the well-fitted
panels of his intellect.