PEN PAL
Illustrated by DON SIBLEY
By MILTON LESSER
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Galaxy Science Fiction July 1951.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
All she wanted was a mate and she had the gumption
to go out and hunt one down. But that meant
poaching in a strictly forbidden territory!
The best that could be said for Matilda Penshaws was that she wassomething of a paradox. She was thirty-three years old, certainly notaged when you consider the fact that the female life expectancy is nowup in the sixties, but the lines were beginning to etch their permanentpaths across her face and now she needed certain remedial undergarmentsat which she would have scoffed ten or even five years ago. Matilda wasalso looking for a husband.
This, in itself, was not unusual—but Matilda was so completelywrapped up in the romantic fallacy of her day that she sought a princecharming, a faithful Don Juan, a man who had been everywhere and tastedof every worldly pleasure and who now wanted to sit on a porch andtalk about it all to Matilda.
The fact that in all probability such a man did not exist disturbedMatilda not in the least. She had been known to say that there are overa billion men in the world, a goodly percentage of whom are eligiblebachelors, and that the right one would come along simply because shehad been waiting for him.
Matilda, you see, had patience.
She also had a fetish. Matilda had received her A.B. from exclusiveUrsula Johns College and Radcliff had yielded her Masters degree, yetMatilda was an avid follower of the pen pal columns. She would readthem carefully and then read them again, looking for the masculinenames which, through a system known only to Matilda, had an affinityto her own. To the gentlemen upon whom these names were affixed,Matilda would write, and she often told her mother, the widow Penshaws,that it was in this way she would find her husband. The widow Penshawsimpatiently told her to go out and get dates.
That particular night, Matilda pulled her battered old sedan into thegarage and walked up the walk to the porch. The widow Penshaws wasrocking on the glider and Matilda said hello.
The first thing the widow Penshaws did was to take Matilda's left handin her own and examine the next-to-the-last finger.
"I thought so," she said. "I knew this was coming when I saw that lookin your eye at dinner. Where is Herman's engagement ring?"
Matilda smiled. "It wouldn't have worked out, Ma. He was too darnedstuffy. I gave him his ring and said thanks anyway and he smiledpolitely and said he wished I had told him sooner because his fifteenthcollege reunion was this weekend and he had already turned down theinvitation."
The widow Penshaws nodded regretfully. "That was thoughtful of Hermanto hide his feelings."
"Hogwash!" said her daughter. "He has no true feelings. He's sorry thathe had to miss his college reunion. That's all he has to hide. A stuffyVictorian prude and even less of a man than the others."
"But, Matilda, that's your fifth broken engagement in three years. Itain't that you ain't popular, but you just don't want to cooperate.You don't fall in love, Matilda—no one does. Love osmoses into youslowly, without you even knowing, and it keeps growing all the time."
Matilda admired her mother's use of the word osmosis, but she foundnothing which was not objectionable about being