Chapter XXVII: Paddy O’Connell replies to Mimi’s letter

The Headland Hotel, Portrush, Ireland,
October 2nd, 1905.

Dear Mimi,--Your pretty letter came to me in confidence, my dear, or I would have answered you with a telegram. Though, to be sure, what a man puts in a telegram is private enough, neither he nor anyone else being able to made head nor tail of it sometimes. What I wanted to say to you was just this--that you are a foolish little girl to write to me as you did, though there’s no one I’d sooner hear from, and no one whose letters I’d be readier to answer.

What’s all this nonsense about the men that watch you, Mimi? Don’t the men always watch a pretty woman anyway? I’ll not flatter you at all, but if it’s the watching that you’re after, come over to this golfing country, and you shall have five and fifty men on the first tee to see you off, and as many of the women behind them to declare you’d be pretty if it wasn’t for your “faytures.” So have done with your nonsense! I’ll be writing Harry this very day and giving him a word of my mind about all that you tell me. He’s made strange friends in his days of seedtime, and they’re above the ground now at the harvest. That’s the way we men have ’em, my dear. We sow friendships in our youth and often enough reap thistles in our old age.

Harry was wise to take you away, and I hope he’ll keep you in the same place. There’s nothing like change, though precious little of that same comes the way of Paddy O’Connell. To me the world is all the same, my dear--just a great grass field with a lot of sand-pits therein, and your Paddy in one of them for a certainty.

What d’ye think the fellows here had the impudence to do this morning? Why, to follow me and old Colonel Willis when we were playing a round of the golf. He’s a very wicked habit of using bad language, which I have no mind to be listening to, and when I saw a crowd about the first tee, I asked them what they supposed they had come out to see. And what do you think they answered me? “Why,” says one of them, “we haven’t come here to see--we’ve come here to listen.” Be hanged to their impudence.

There’s one point in your letter which I haven’t spoken of, Mimi, and I speak of it now unwillingly. ’Twould be about the Lea woman. Be sure that Harry will see no more of her. I say it, and Paddy O’Connell makes no mistakes in a matter of this kind. He’s done with her--he wished to be done with her a year ago, but she wouldn’t let him. And ask yourself this, my dear--when a man has got the woman he wants, is he likely to want the woman he hasn’t got? Think no more of it, I say. Be off with him to all the places where there’s music to be heard and bright people to be seen, and let me hear of the brave little girl I used to know in Paris, and will never forget.

So here’s my love to you wrapped up in a bit of a letter and posted in the great Irish country. ’Tis no great spirit I’m writing in, but you’d never understand all the trouble that comes to a man who’s taking three on the greens where he ought to take two, and can never hold a hand at the cards without somebody insulting him. To the devil with them all! They put two aces of hearts in the pack of cards I played Bridge with last night, and me not discovering it until the second rubber. Would ye wonder that I walked out of the window and banged it after me.

I write to Harry by this post. If he shouldn’t show you the letter, don’t pretend to know what’s in it.

But it’s wisdom, my dear, and that’s a rare commodity in these days.--God bless you--and,

Paddy O’Connell.