After explaining how Wednesday nights are wearing him out, he lobs an incendiary device in Dot’s direction.
“Sometimes you make me MAD! Sometimes I see red! You keep telling me you can’t do things, then it comes out you’ve been holding out on me. First you can’t dance. Now you won a dancing contest five years ago. For Heaven’s sake, don’t you ever say anything good about yourself? Now let’s have it straight about the dancing contest. What kind of dancing? When? Where? How, and so forth? Don’t tell me you’ve been fibbing to me all these years about not liking to jitterbug. If you’ve been doing it to make me feel better about my sad, sad attempts at dancing, I thank you very much for sparing my feelings. But gol-lee, Dot. Why don’t you tell me some things? I guess I don’t know you as well as I thought I did!”
Then he asks if there is something worrying her or bothering her. He tells her that for a few days her letters have seemed sort of absent-minded, as though she’d been thinking about something else as she wrote. He claims she’s even left out an occasional whole phrase. He offers to help, if there’s anything he can do. He suggests it may be his imagination running wild again and he hopes she’ll tell him if that’s the case. Then he asks if she’s worried about that operation she mentioned, or maybe about “us.”
This brings us to a four-page rant about voting, American politics, and Dart’s view of what’s wrong. Essentially, the solution is for everyone to be as informed and politically literate as himself, and then we’d all have a better government. Included in his diatribe was his opinion of voting a straight ticket (It’ll bring about the end of civilization), which politicians are corrupt (almost all the incumbents), the dangers of election-time propaganda (a drug to the lazy thinkers), etc. He wraps it up with “I do not claim to have THE answers…but I have my answers.” He encourages Dot to argue with him.
He must sleep. He loves her. He’s reluctant to say good night, but he must.
# # #
Dot must get up early tomorrow to collect her paycheck and run errands before reporting for work.
She found out today that she must work on Armistice Day, but that suits her fine because she’ll receive double pay.
“Seems to me all I write about are my finances and all the troubles they cause me. What makes you think I can teach you anything about having the good sense not to let them worry me? I stayed awake for hours the other night trying to figure out how to pay the necessary bills and still have money in the bank. Mom says after I’ve figured it out, she’ll make it worth my while to give her the formula.”
“I must admit this letter’s rather short, but one place I don’t fall short is in loving you.”