Work!  Why work?  It is the order of the One Supreme.

So saying, at one o’clock of Sunday morning, he lifted up his hand and waved three times to the Southward—­once for the Lady of the Troubled Heart, who flirts with the Angel of Destruction, thinking he may turn out to be a God, and once for the Lord of the Lady, serenely fatalistic, and the third, and this a very big one, for the Princeling who is making a manly battle, cheerfully, confidently.  The Friend of the Three.

F. K L.

Washington, [February 5, 1920]

And so, again the Boy has been attacked by a strange enemy, and you are fighting.  That is what you have been doing for years, fighting for that bit of life you love more than your own self.  You did not think you could do it when you were a girl, did you?  You have wondered at yourself many, many times.  And wondered at the Fate which brought this long challenge to you.  But it has been a splendid fight, hasn’t it?  A glorious fight against odds.  There has been no justice in it.  No justice, and our souls do so want justice, an even chance, something in front of us that we can see and know and fight.  God knows why such tortures come to some, while others sail on such smooth seas.  Can it be that there is no soul excepting the one we make for ourselves by fighting?  Are those really blest who have such challenges given to their spirits?  Or is this all by way of excusing God, or Nature, for the unexplainable?

There is no way to make the fight excepting to believe that the fight is the thing—­the one, only, greatest thing. (To deny this is to leave all in a welter, and drift into purposeless cynicism, —­blackness.) To determine that this is the way, the truth, and the life, is to get serenity.  Then the winds may howl and the seas roll, but there can be no wreck.

I know you don’t like to be coddled.  You are not of the cotton-batting school.  You can take and give.  But “may I not” say a word of appreciation and perhaps of stimulation—­give you a good masculine thump on the shoulder by way of saying that for one who lives in a mist you have lots of gimp.  To love something better than oneself is the first step, I guess, toward making that soul.

Please read the note, in special envelop, to Ralphie, when he will be interested.  By Jove, how fortunate that we could not leave.  All my force is sick.  Three of my assistants are laid up.  Six hundred and eighty people in my Department are in bed.  And I am struggling to get out and leave my job up to date.  Good fortune!

F. K. L.

[Katonah, August, 1920]

...  You know that I love you—­yes, just as much as Ralph Ellis, who is a tough sailor man, and Anne Lane, who is a citizen of two worlds, will let me.  But I would love you more, much more, if you did not have to be induced by my wife to write to me.  Your love letter was all right, but it was procured.  Do you get that word—­ procured—­and my wife was the procuress.  This may be de rigueur and comme il faut and umslopogass on Long Island, but it does not go in Katonah—­peaceful, pure Katonah!