make life, don’t they?  And to be a health-giver is not merely to have charm.  That is the spell-casting power, to be filled with witchery, to be a witch.  Yes, I believe it is something like that—­very much in fact, but the witchery must be balsamic, it must be radiant, it must go out in rays or circles or waves, because it can’t help going out, not purposefully and selfishly, like the casting of a net—­it must be balsamic and radiant, the outbreathing of pines.

Now this is a very nice name I have called you—­you can put it into Latin or Greek or French and make it sound much better to the unimaginative.  But you deserve it, and I hope my little girl will become one.

FRANKLIN K. LANE

Katonah, Sunday, [September 25, 1920]

...  We leave here on Wednesday (D.  V.) for Bethel because you said to.  Now how soon will you follow—­a day—­a week?  Not more!

You made up your mind that you would go there, and there is now to be proof given whether your mind is weak or riding strong.

Anne is to have H. Beale there, and they move in circles barred to me.  So I shall sorely need someone who knows my language.  And I am not frivolous when I say that you and I need nothing more than a religious faith of some kind.  Mohammedan, Christian Science, or what you will.  We are both religious—­deeply.  We pray—­we do things for the good of men and women,—­but we do not relate ourselves properly to the Great Enveloping, Permeating Spirit.  I have sought to, vainly, for many years, and yet I have not been persistent.  “Seek and ye shall find!” I want to believe that the God of Things as They Are is not wilfully cruel.  Is He indifferent?

Are we mastering something?  Tell me!  Do you know?  What philosophy have you come to?

Well, all this we can talk over when we reach Bethel.  Say, do you ever answer letters or is it your Queenly prerogative to drop your sweethearts down the public oubliette?

F. K. L.

Washington, 27 [December, 1920]

My wife won’t let me call on you, “not now, anyhow,” she says.  Oh, you have so many enemies!  Adolph and Mary, Senator and Mrs. Kellogg, Chief Justice and Mrs. White, Dr. and Mrs. Gehring.  All are against you, and against me—­all plotting, planning, and conspiring with my wife to keep us apart.  They know the hold you have on me, that I had rather have you as my doctor than any one else in the whole vasty Universe—­but why sigh?  I am to be torn away on Wednesday and rushed to Rochester, where the Mayos will take me in hand, and do their worst.  I have great hope that they may cut me into happiness, and carve me into health, and slice me into strength.

So, as Anne wired, we shall not see you in Camden, nor Ralph nor the Junior nor anything that is Ellis—­not for some moons anyway.

...  The reason for going to Mayos?  To see if it is true that my stomach and my gall bladder have become too intimate.  Rochester is the Reno where such divorces are granted.