sent him a line. And that was why Norah felt so bad, because she couldn’t write except the very plainest things, and of course, plain writing is no use in love letters. She knew that as well as anybody, but what could she do?
Ben asked her to show her the letter the girl wrote, but Norah couldn’t because she had torn it up into little pieces and then chewed up the pieces
Ben wrote the letter. and spit them out in the road for the horses to tread upon, she said.
“It’s this way with me entirely, Miss,” she told Ben, “much as I may feel the heart in my breast beating in sorrow, I couldn’t write it if it was to save my life, at all.”
Which was fortunate for her, because Ben was just the one to write it, though she didn’t feel that way. If you can write such exciting things as Ben can, you don’t have to really mean any of them, you see.
So Ben said: “I’ll write a letter for you, Norah, for I’m sure I can do it beautifully.”
And Norah said: “But that'll be forgery I’m afraid, Miss, and I’m likely to get arrested.”
And Ben said, no, not if she signed her name herself. So Norah thanked her, and Ben wrote the letter. It was a little like one in one of Charles Reade’s books—I can’t remember which one, because we have been reading them all, lately, and they get mixed up in my head. But some of the things in it made Norah cry, Ben said, when she read it to her. She read it to us first, and parts of it were certainly grand. In one place it said:
“You tell me that all must be at an end between us, but how can I submit to such torture? A woman’s heart, my friend, is like the summer sea—a changing surface, but an unplumbed, constant depth!” That last sentence was all out of a novel. I don’t know who by, but the cover is dark green.
Another place was, “Do you remember that last night in the conservatory? Shall I ever forget the waltz they played? You were in white”—I can’t remember any more of it, but even Ben had to admit that it was a pretty fine part. Afterwards we remembered that that was out of a letter to a girl from a man, but Ben couldn't copy it all over again, so we left it in. You see, Norah never was in a conservatory, probably, so it didn’t matter, as I don’t suppose the fresh vegetable man ever was either.
Anyhow she signed it—she had to copy the way Ben wrote her name a million times, I should think—and the vegetable man came to call the next night. Norah wasn’t surprised, she said.
“If it’s letters he wants, Miss, sure that one will lift him right up off his feet, he’ll come runnin’ so quick,” she told Ben, and it was true. He told her he’d never seen a finer letter in his life, let alone got one, and that settled it for him, for he always loved her best. And they got married very soon and we clubbed together and gave her a cut-glass celery dish. And she will always pray for Ben as long as the breath lasts in her.
Well, that was a great success, of course, and it made Ben just crazy to do something else like it, which is the way she always is. But there wasn’t anybody else that needed marrying that we knew of. And I am sure that we should never have thought of Miss Peck all by ourselves. It was the Pie—who is usually called Miss Appleby—that
