Rama Eyre By Burnham Unexpurgated Outpourings SATIRE This page is dedicated to hopeful youth and those twin inheritors of misfortune's cruelest legacy: the lonely and the frustrate. By our own confession it is a bold venture, for we realize full well that there is much sound argument against any attempt to plumb the mysteries of the human heart, to draw aside the veil that shrouds kindred souls in that tender period of anticipated amalgamation. But since youth must be taught at some time or other a rational approach to the fundamental issues involved in human relationships, and since school years are the most plastic years, what could be more legitimate than sincere attempts by the official organs of educative establishments to mark out a sure course to marital bliss? Scribulus points the way. Besides presenting, in the fearless spirit of one consecrated to a holy mission, four unexpurgated and unabridged outpourings of sacred sentiment, we offer a prefatory interpretation done in true instructional spirit. Our end in view is not to go so far backstage in our comment as to point out the detailed workings of courtship machinery, for that would put our well-meant efforts in the bad light of ill-mannered curiosity; rather do we want to distinguish the basic differences which obtain between two philosophies of soul-to-soul correspondence and make plain the methods by which each would accomplish, in keeping with the general tenor of its times, the same result. The first of the two letters which follow was, as the response indicates, completely successful. The last of an eminent series done by a born romanticist and skilled student of the human heart, it illustrates the ultimate in salesmanship: the sentiment is bold, masterful, compelling; yet it is full of idealism and a respect that approaches veneration. The hand, which, unfortunately, it not revealed in print, is uncertain, revealing profound agitation. The diction shows Johnsonian dignity, though nothing of the dull gravity which marks, too often, purely intellectual pursuit; the whole is suffused in the pastel-hued elegance that befits the grand age of lavender and old lace. The sentiment expresses the pathetic yearning that is the inevitable consequence of an honest soul imbued with the conception of courtship as a beautiful adventure and marriage a sacred institution. There is no suggestion of the present-day popular picturing of the marital state as an antiquated convention sustainable only in a spirit of philosophic toleration and justified simply on the grounds of economic and social convenience. It represents the right method of trapping by mail. The answer is among the shortest, yet most expressive, things in pre-marriage literature. It is eminently typical of one completely mastered. The hand shows such trembling that it is scarcely legible. Through the whole of the single momentous sentence runs the spirit of one submissive, agitated, exhaused. It is a masterful bit of prose: profound meaning couched in simple terms. The second letter is in every respect quite different from the first. Its diction shows a pathetic lack of solemnity, a too superficial regard for that sacred twain; marriage and the home. Its tone expresses a boldness of manner and breeziness of spirit which belong to the conception of courtship as a light adventure. In all it is woefully superficial, a good example of what not to do if one would woo and win. The answer is a monumental thing. It is dedicated to the modern spirit of sex independence: bold, self-sufficient, unmaternal, flippantly clever. Yes, it too is masterful, but in a sad way, for it denies in frivolous manner the divinest impulses of the human heart. FIRST LETTER O Lovely One, My heart, my heart, my quivering heart! Madly beateth it! Wildly does it toss my blood; deeply does it plunge me into divine confusion and dark despair. It throws all things out of joint causes the cogs of the world to slip, so that the days seem not to be carried along their ordinary course by the quick succession of hours; it has clipped the wings of time and forced each moment to shuffle heavy-footed into eternity. Every pulse-beat tells me that we have been apart for years, though the clock and calendar, wretched things, insist that only two days have passed since' we kept tryst beneath the stars and talked of things heavenly. Ah me, Creature Divine! My whole being burns with sacred flames of immortal love. Why then is it so that we (Continued on Page 20) page 11