LIFE-WORK ENDED?

By March he had adjusted to the more reserved company he found himself in, and ‘recovered from the blues’.4 There were, also, a good range of things to be enjoyed in Philadelphia in the intervals between taking examinations in Hebrew, and as well as playing tennis, riding and boating, Buchman was soon making his number with young ladies of good position, fortified by a new pair of patent leather shoes. He had been invited, he wrote to his parents, to visit a Miss Taylor who was staying with family friends in Philadelphia – ‘very aristocratic people’ - and later he reported on the success of the visit. The shoes, he declared, had looked stunning; he only wished they could have seen him.5

Almost immediately he was invited to attend the wedding of Florence Thayer's sister in Woonsocket, and he started to lay careful siege to his father's pocket-book. It would, he told his parents, be a great education ‘to see the beautiful decorations, the people and the like’, the chance of a life-time, in fact. He didn't expect ever again to get an invitation to such a fine wedding because he had but one millionaire family on his acquaintance list. The only other wedding he could expect to attend was his own – ‘that is if I ever marry a girl like Miss Thayer, who can afford such a wedding’.

Then, no doubt recalling his previous letter about the visit to Miss Taylor, he seeks to reassure them that his affections are not promiscuous and that, this time, their money would be spent on the true object of his heart. ‘I think I must stick to Miss Thayer’, he declares, with perhaps a touch of remorse, ‘as she seems more devoted than ever.’6

Fearing his first effort may have no fruit, Buchman tries again. ‘You may think’, he writes, ‘that I want too much, but it will only be a few years more and then I shall enter on my life's work. Then I cannot taste these pleasures.’ ‘A man who enters the ministry’, he adds, ‘must of a necessity be social... It's the getting out into the world that opens one's eyes.’ The letter also contains a poetic description of an afternoon sky, which he had sat and watched for two hours, bolstered by comments on the moral purpose of beauty.7 ‘My ambition is some day to become an author,’ he added next day. ‘I am going to aim high. An author cannot describe a scene unless he has seen and experienced it. If he wishes to describe a fashionable wedding, he cannot imagine it, he must see one. I could never have described to you yesterday's sky had I not seen it. Do you catch the force of my argument?’8

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