Letter from Sinclair Lewis to Marcella Powers, July 31, 1942

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SINCLAIR   LEWIS
Friday    July    31
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Dear love, another month gone by. I'm sure your month
hasn't been wasted. Mine hasn't%  a lot of novel, some
reading, some reviewing of German, a lot of glimpses of
Minnesota and, best and really most lasting, letters
from you and thoughts about you so vivid that they don't
fade out of the mind but linger, a lovely crystallized
mirage*
Dorothy is really wonderful in her sweet, steady,
resolute pattern of ne^er doing anything whatever until
shefcets damn good and ready to.  (That's the stuff that
makes Mme Curies and Edith Whartons: note it, you young
waverer, who are so tentative that 1 don't believe youTre
more than fifteen or sixteen times as stubborn as I
am.) All of which means that today, the last of July,
I STILL don't know when Micky, who is supposed to be
here onorabout August 1, will actually arrive. I've
written to.her with severity, cajolery, pale mauve
humor, blasting jedharriscolored fulmination; I've
explained that here we keep the telephone in the filled
baghtub and the only way of getting a telegram is to
goto the wheat elevator in Pierre, South Dakota, and
ask for it; that a letter a few days ahead announcing
Just when he'd arrive would be such a lovely wee helple
in making planAs. And still I haven't had one.
I am by god the most successful brute about bullying
Women land as you know, by Women I usually mean youT
since Caspar Milquetoast was six years old.
A tender, dreamy, early-fall-like day, for going walking
if one had some one to go walking with.
I'm going to write my letters double-spaced handwritten. Then even this hasty note would come to
11 pages and you, even you, would be Impressed, and
say fondly, "Oh, my, what a wonnerful long, long epistle
that lovely Mr. Sinclair has been and gone and written
me."
Darling how can I help chattering to you so much when
I love you so much....Do you know, there are no other
loveable women? NONE. xxx    <r