The Indiscreet Letter by Eleanor Hallowell Abbott: A witty and engaging novella exploring themes of love, secrecy, and human connection during a chance encounter on a train. Available for free download in PDF, EPUB, and MOBI formats.
The Indiscreet Letter Summary
The Indiscreet Letter by Eleanor Hallowell Abbott is a charming novella set during a train journey where three strangers—a Traveling Salesman, a Young Electrician, and a Youngish Girl—engage in a candid conversation. Through witty dialogue and vibrant characters, the story delves into themes of love, trust, and indiscretion. Download this engaging classic in PDF, EPUB, and MOBI formats.The Indiscreet Letter Excerpt
Excerpt from The Indiscreet Letter by Eleanor Hallowell Abbott:
The Railroad Journey was very long and slow. The Traveling Salesman was rather short and quick. And the Young Electrician who lolled across the car aisle was neither one length nor another, but most inordinately flexible, like a suit of chain armor.
More than being short and quick, the Traveling Salesman was distinctly fat and unmistakably dressy in an ostentatiously new and pure-looking buff-colored suit, and across the top of the shiny black sample-case that spanned his knees he sorted and re-sorted with infinite earnestness a large and varied consignment of "Ladies' Pink and Blue Ribbed Undervests." Surely no other man in the whole southward-bound Canadian train could have been at once so ingenuous and so nonchalant.
There was nothing dressy, however, about the Young Electrician. From his huge cowhide boots to the lead smouch that ran from his rough, square chin to the very edge of his astonishingly blond curls, he was one delicious mess of toil and old clothes and smiling, blue-eyed indifference. And every time that he shrugged his shoulders or crossed his knees he jingled and jangled incongruously among his coil-boxes and insulators, like some splendid young Viking of old, half blacked up for a modern minstrel show.
More than being absurdly blond and absurdly messy, the Young Electrician had one of those extraordinarily sweet, extraordinarily vital, strangely mysterious, utterly unexplainable masculine faces that fill your senses with an odd, impersonal disquietude, an itching unrest, like the hazy, teasing reminder of some previous existence in a prehistoric cave, or, more tormenting still, with the tingling, psychic prophecy of some amazing emotional experience yet to come. The sort of face, in fact, that almost inevitably flares up into a woman's startled vision at the one crucial moment in her life when she is not supposed to be considering alien features.
Something, indeed, in the peculiar set of the Young Electrician's jaw warned you quite definitely that if you should ever even so much as hint the small, sentimental word "lure" to him he would most certainly "swat" you on first impulse for a maniac, and on second impulse for a liar—smiling at you all the while in the strange little wrinkly tissue round his eyes.
The voice of the Railroad Journey was a dull, vague, conglomerate, cinder-scented babble of grinding wheels and shuddering window frames; but the voices of the Traveling Salesman and the Young Electrician were shrill, gruff, poignant, inert, eternally variant, after the manner of human voices which are discussing the affairs of the universe.
"Every man," affirmed the Traveling Salesman sententiously—"every man has written one indiscreet letter during his lifetime!"
"Only one?" scoffed the Young Electrician with startling distinctness above even the loudest roar and rumble of the train.
With a rather faint, rather gaspy chuckle of amusement the Youngish Girl in the seat just behind the Traveling Salesman reached forward then and touched him very gently on the shoulder.
"Oh, please, may I listen?" she asked quite frankly.
With a smile as benevolent as it was surprised, the Traveling Salesman turned half-way around in his seat and eyed her quizzically across the gold rim of his spectacles.
"Why, sure you can listen!" he said.
The Traveling Salesman was no fool. People as well as lisle thread were a specialty of his. Even in his very first smiling estimate of the Youngish Girl he recognized her at once as a most unusual person.
She wasn't pretty, and she wasn't homely. She wasn't young, and she wasn't old. She wasn't smart, and she wasn't dull. She was just—alive! With her tumbled mass of chestnut hair, her vivid little crooked mouth, her white-on-white traveling coat, and her narrow feet swinging recklessly from their frilled skirts, she looked for all the world like a grown-up cherub who had never learned to fly.
"Why, sure you can listen!" said the Traveling Salesman. "Are you particularly interested in—indiscreet letters?"
"Oh, no!" laughed the Youngish Girl. "I'm particularly interested in people who are interested in indiscreet letters."
