the exact disturbing effect of the _ensemble_ upon any poor male, and
feeling confident of my excessively eligible _parti_ when I decide for
him--in this situation, striven for so earnestly, I feel like bolting
the bars. How my trainer and jockey would weep tears of rage and
despair if they guessed it!

There, there--I know your shrewd grey eyes are crackling with curiosity
and, you want to know what it's all about, whether to scold me or
mother me, and will I please omit the _entrees_ and get to the roast
mutton. But you dear, dear old aunt, you, there is more vagueness than
detail, and I know I'll strain your patience before I've done. But, to
relieve your mind, nothing at all has really happened. After all, it's
mostly a _troublesome state of mind_, that I shall doubtless find gone
when we reach Jersey City,--and in two ways this Western trip is
responsible for it. Do you know the journey itself has been
fascinating. Too bad so many of us cross the ocean twenty times before
we know anything of this country. We loiter in Paris, do the stupid
German watering-places, the Norway fjords, down to Italy for the
museums, see the _chateaux_ of the Loire, or do the English
race-tracks, thinking we're 'mused; and all the time out here where the
sun goes down is an intensely interesting and beautiful country of our
own that we overlook. You know I'd never before been even as far as
Chicago. Now for the first time I can appreciate lots of those things
in Whitman, that--

"I think heroic deeds were all conceived in the open air, and free
poems, also. Now I see the secret of making the best persons: It is
to grow in the open air and to eat and sleep with the earth."

I mayn't have quoted correctly, but you know the sort of thing I mean,