No names! it says;—but I think you know me. Here is the girl who will make us rich—that fresh little finger smith, I''ve had cause in the past to employ her skills, and can commend her. She is watching as I write this, and oh! her ignorance is perfect. I imagine her now, gazing at you. She is luckier than I, who must pass two filthy weeks before enjoying that pleasure.—Burn this, will you?
I have thought myself as cool as he. I am not, I am not, I feel her watching—-just as he describes!—and grow fearful. I stand with the letter in my hand, then am aware all at once that I have stood too long. If she should have seen—! I fold the paper, once, twice, thrice— finally it will not fold at all. I do not yet know that she cannot read or write so much as her own name; when I learn it I laugh, in an awful relief. But I don''t quite believe her. ''Not read?'' I say. ''Not a letter, not a word?''—and I hand her a book. She does not want to take it; and when she does, she opens its covers, turns a page, gazes hard at a piece of text—but all in a way that is wrong, indefinably anxious and wrong, and too subtle to counterfeit.—At last, she blushes.
Then I take the book back. ''I am sorry,'' I say. But I am not sorry, I am only amazed. Not to read! It seems to me a kind of fabulous insufficiency—like the absence, in a martyr or a saint, of the capacity for pain.