Scribner’s Magazine/Volume 47/Number 5/The Candid Friend

THE CANDID FRIEND
By Alice Duer Miller
Illustrations by F. Graham Cootes

SIMMONS never went into the writing-room of the club; the association was too painful. But to-night, with the courage born of an approaching crisis, he came and stood a moment in the doorway, and looked at the corner writing-table. There, two years ago, with the help of that spotless blotting-paper, with those clean gray pens, looking out over these same housetops from the windows of this quiet upper room, he had committed one of those blunders which are as unexpected, as illogical, and as irretrievable as death.
He had written two letters:

L. S."

And then, drawing a larger sheet to him, he had written:

"Dear Wickes: If a fellow wrote to tell you that he was the victim of a slow disease, now in its incipient stages, which would eventually blind him and deafen him, and keep him confined to one small, ill-furnished room, no one would expect you to write him a letter of congratulation. Yet this is what I have just had to do. The best friend I have in the world is going to be married, and, ye gods! to such a woman! If I saw her now for the first time I should probably think her a perfect mate, and envy my

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