"June 23.

"Dear Narcissa —

<"When I got off the train> "Well, I ran. Once I had not the courage to admit it, now I
have not the courage to deny it. I found more reality than I could stomach, I suppose. Call it that, anyway. I
dont seem to care. Only I wish Belle had stayed in Kentucky. At least, that's out of the whole damned state where
such can happen.

"She was at home. When Jones – you remember him: the one who says he used to lead
Kinston society; now he drives it – put me down at the corner, I saw her shade up and the rosy light,
and I thought of that unfailing aptitude of women for co-inciding with the emotional periphery of a man at
the exact moment when <it> the fates have prized his jaws for the regurgitated bit. Thus (your own words)
like a nigger I left her; like a nigger I returned (via the kitchen); entered the house and stood
in the door while Belle laid her magazine down and watched me from her pink nest while I shed
the ultimate cockleburr of errant itch and the final mudflake of the high pastures where the air
had been a little too ardent and a little too savage, and so into the old barn and the warm
twilight and the old stall fitting again to the honorable trace-galls, and, ay, the old manger lipped satin-
smooth by the old unfailing oats.

"Little Belle is not at home. Thank God: at what age does man cease to believe
that he must support a certain figure in the world before his women-folks? She is at a house-party.
Where, Belle did not say, other than it divulging to be in the exact center of bad telephone connections.
Thank God she is no flesh and blood of mine. I thank God that no bone and flesh of mine has taken that
form which, <inherent> rife with its inherent folly, knells and bequeaths its own disaster, untouched. Untouched,
mind you. That's what hurts. Not that there is evil in the world, evil belongs in the world: it is the mortar
in which the bricks are set. It's that they can be so impervious to the mire which they reveal and <[make?]>
teach us to abhor; can wallow without tarnishment in the very stuff <by> in the comparison with which
their <magic> bright, sad magic lies. Cling to it. Not through fear; merely through some innate instinct of <fem>
incomprehensible female economy, as they will employ any wiles whatever to haggle a butcher out of a penny.
Thank God I have not and will never have a child – and for that reason I have assailed not only
a long distance but a rural line, at 11 P.M. in order to hear a cold, polite, faintly surprised young
voice on an unsatisfactory wire, a voice that, between polite inanities, in response to inanities, carried
on a verbal skirmishing with another one – not feminine – without even doing me the compliment of
lying to conceal the fact that she had been squired to the telephone; needs must project over the dead
wire to me, whose hair she has watched thinning for 10 years, that gay mammalian rifeness which she
discovered herself less long ago than I <have> did that to anyone less than 25 years old, I am worse
than dead.

"I ran. I dont try to palliate it. But I want to rectify it as far as possible.
I know this will be distasteful, but it will be the last time, I promise that: next time I may not even
have the courage to return. I want you to tell that woman that I must give up the case, but that I
am putting it in the hands of the best criminal lawyer I can find, for an appeal. Do this, my dear. You
will have no trouble finding her. She's there now, in front of the jail with that child, standing where he can
[margin: see them from that window. God, if he were just the only one that had to see her there.

"Horace"]