Letty Fox Read Online Free PDF Page A

a cocktail before going to his office; and now I took a taxi back uptown to Eleventh Street. As this made a small hole in the thirty dollars (and this was about all I had) I telephoned to Mother asking her to meet me for a cocktail at Longchamps in Twelfth Street. She made a fuss about it, but did eventually meet me there, and sat on a stool at the bar as she really likes to do. I then asked her to lend me ten dollars for tips to the men who move the furniture. She only had six dollars with her and this left me rather short. I told her I had barely the money to pay out to servants at the hotel, and as she had disappointed me, I was obliged to ask her to pay for the drinks. However, it was all right. She told me she was visiting her youngest sister, my Aunt Phyllis, for the week end, and that Phyllis, Phyllis’s husband and Cissie Morgan (her mother) were always so ashamed of her poor dress that they were always offering her small sums. I begged her to take the money this time if it were offered to her. “It humiliates me so,” cried Mother. “It makes me indignant, too,” I said; “but take it once.” However, I dropped this fruitless struggle.
    When Mother asked me the address of my new place I misquoted it, so that she would not go straight there; and though she would see it soon, I could not let her see it till I was in. My plan has always been to present people with the fait accompli. It is the only way to get things done. I therefore told her, as I had told Papa, that the rent was only sixty dollars monthly; I thought I would leave them in the dark, making myself out to be a good bargainer, for a few months at least, until life caught up with me. If expenses mounted too high, I would simply put it all before them and ask for aid; but, frankly, I did not expect to come down on them; I thought I would see my way clear by the fall. I would have had it out with Cornelis by then.
    After all these anxious calculations I left Mother on lower Fifth Avenue to navigate her way home. She lived near the Hudson River now, in a small affair. I came back to my apartment.
    I was at first almost deliriously happy. The first night, after I had put up photographs of the Morgan family, I unpacked all my old letters and books and I plunged into this stuff, this real, close-woven fabric of my youth, which was past, with pleasure. There were boxes of letters, photographs which I had kept from childhood, letters I had written to Grandma Fox, returned to me after her death, poor darling; letters which had passed between me and my sister Jacky, in our squabbles, and letters from my mother and father, who had been separated for many years. There were theater programs, menus from Paris, bills from a school I once attended in England. What a varicolored life; and yet at times I felt I had nothing to tell. There were also, of course, many packets of letters from boy friends. I had been wanting to get at these for months, just to check up; to see, for example, whether the graduated mendacity of Mr. A of five years ago, was not a perfect model of that of Mr. B with whom I was still philandering. I had come to the point when I wanted to make a clean sweep, and felt a general uneasiness about the kind of life I was leading. “A tourist,” Papa called me, a tourist to men, that is. I reckoned I knew enough about life to write a real book of a girl’s life. Men don’t like to think that we are just as they are. But we are much as they are; and therefore I have omitted the more wretched details of that close connection, that profound, wordless struggle that must go on in the relation between the sexes. I have come to the conclusion that it must go on and that certain realities of love between men and women should not be told. I have written everyday facts which, doubtless, have happened in the life of almost every New York middle-class girl who has gone out from high school or college to make a living in the