6. Music Lessons

Now this was where I came in. My unknown friend said her conscience didn’t trouble her one bit. And she had been paying these fictitious week-end visits to Madge quite frequently. Everybody was happy, including mother. No, sir; her conscience hadn’t bothered her. But what did I think of it?

During the past score of years I have been receiving quite a lot of mail making comments upon stories I have written or asking questions about them. Such correspondence, I believe, is called “fan” mail. And my mailbox also contains many letters on all manner of subjects. It would be quite impossible for me to answer all of these letters myself, and get anything else done; so my secretary replies to most of them, saying about what she thinks any sensible person would say on such occasions.

But, once in a while, a letter will turn up that takes some doing. In the case of this particular letter, I sat down at my typewriter and experimented with a reply. I told this girl that she would be sorry, some day; that nice people didn’t do such things; that she had better make her mother’s last days happy, and incidentally save her own soul.

I closed the letter with every good wish, and pulled it out of the machine. On rereading it, I didn’t like it, and decided to try it again. One phrase of the reply I had written piqued my imagination: it was my implication that her mother, quite evidently her senior, might die sometime. It would be droll, I figured, to ask her if she had ever considered poisoning her mother. It wouldn’t be much worse than what she had been doing. But perhaps she had no sense of humor. In any case I shouldn’t want her to be showing the letter to her friends. So I tried it again.

This time I wrote her a real scorcher! If what she had foolishly called her conscience didn’t trouble her, there was certainly no excuse for her pestering me with her problems. I told her I was a busy man, and didn’t thank people for dumping their misdemeanors into my lap and asking me to figure them up on my adding machine. I told her she had no right to send questions of that nature to total strangers!

But when I looked this letter over I was aghast to discover that it was the equivalent of plenary absolution. So, I tore up all the letters I had written, and decided to stand on my constitutional rights. I wasn’t obliged to answer her letter at all; and I didn’t.

I knew of a case where a selfish old man practically imprisoned his three daughters. He, too, was an invalid, and kept the three of them on the jump, waiting on him “hand and foot.” He went to bed promptly at eight-thirty and it distressed him if there was any stirring about the house after that hour. The old fellow hung right on, too, lacking the grace to die until he was eighty and his girls were long past the mating period. He often told them what a fortunate family they were, and how happy they all had been. (End of harangue on The Tyranny of the Chronic Invalid.)

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