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292 Thursday 2 August 12:30 pm Delicious - I'm in such a good humor today that anytime when I was not seems remote and irrelevant. First of all, it's a lovely day - a break in the overcast and rainy weather we've had recently. Secondly, I receive three especially warm and lovable letters from you, in which without being any less eager to have me home you were not so impatient and strained about it. Thirdly, the officers’ mess was very boisterous at lunch today as a result of the article by Mary Jean Kempner in the August 1st issue of Vogue (do try especially hard to get a copy somewhere, will you? You could put an ad in the Pine Cone) - everyone was ribbing Tel about it. But beneath these things of the moment I suspect that the decisive factor was the fresh grasp of perspective that I've had since we got [S?] and I began to have time to think and to keep within my effective sphere. Everything's rolling along beautifully [pg 2] now; as a natural consequence, there is no more friction between Tel and me, and when he or both of us decide we want something done he keeps hands off in the execution of it because he can take it for granted now that it will be done. That's just one of the many small angles of administration that, among other things, I refer to when I say that I learn things nearly every day here. Incidentally, I couldn't help taking to heart a little the other day a phrase which the buoyant Jim Boyle tossed off with boisterous disdain (in regard to Slicer) - “Self pity will make a riff in a man's character that you can drive a coach-and-four into.” And as to further quotations, Don van Kougnet got one off at lunch in the [?] which followed disclosure of the article about Tel (he and Tel kid each other about what each is going to tell the other's wife when he gets back to the Sates) - “Listen to him, he seeks not only to prick my conscience, but to rape it!” [pg 3] Kempner described Tel as “beanpole tall, pink-faced, earnest H. Terjen Mook” I could almost believe that she spelt his name that way deliberately (he scarcely noticed her as a woman all the time that he was with her but was way off thinking about the school; and she is a woman obviously used to having her way with men, as she did with the Island Commander); when she left here she took with her a copy of that memorandum on the school that I sent you, with his name printed quite clearly at the end of it. I should say, rather, that I do believe it; for nobody could read “Terjen” without thinking of “virgin.” One table of six men spent the whole lunch hour making limericks out of the name - limited chiefly, of course, to the rimes “sturgeon” and “virgin” Friday 7:15 am I love you, darling Warren
