NAWSA GENERAL CORRESPONDENCE Peck, Marg Gray (to Carrie Chapman CATT) Mary Gray Peck's memo Meetings N.A.W.S.A. Board 1921 - Cleveland - April 1925 - Washington Hotel, Washington, April 23rd 1929 - New Rochelle, Mrs. Catt's home, Thursday, Mar. 14 (McCormick, Brown, Park, Catt, Shuler 1936 - New York City, Cosmopolitan Club, March 19 1938 - New Rochelle, C.C.Catt's home, May 2nd Clifton Springs RD 3 Sat. July 3. 1926 Dear Pandora:- You say in "Evolution Fifty Years Ago" that you entered High School at 13, and College at 18. I cant make this agree with my schedule of dates. If you graduated from college, November, 1880, as you have written me previously, and if you were there only 3 years, as you have said, you must have been 19 when you entered, since the college year began around March. Again, if you entered High School at 13, it must have been in the fall of 1872, and you graduated in the spring of 1876 if you went straight thru. Then you taught a summer and winter term to earn money to go to college. That brings us to the spring of 1877. What did you do from this date to the spring of 1878, which was the time when you entered college, if you were there three years, graduating 1880? Perhaps your High School course was interrupted for a year, or perhaps you taught two years between high school & college. And if you entered college at 18, perhaps you staid out a year to teach during your college course. It would preserve my reason if you could cast light on this foggy schedule. This letter shall be devoted solely to Clio, Muse of History. Therefore I will bid you a formal but respectful and devoted farewell. Ever, Honoured Madam Your most obedient servant, Mary Gray Peck. Clifton Springs RD3. NY. March 23, 1927 Well, dearest Pandora, -- There is something in mental suggestion. Every time I settle down to feeling specially abused because I dont hear from you, and keep it up two or three days, you never fail to come out of the kitchen & write! Yesterday came a letter from you which has cleared the diplomatic air considerably, altho you didnt answer the main question I asked you. Dont tell me you didnt see it! I think your dentist might have taken off the pivot and treated the abcess on the root of your teeth. It is a dreadful thing for you to have to hear teeth extracted, and I could weep over it! Ive got one of that brand of tooth in my head and never a whimper out of it lo these twenty years! I'll bet, however, if they took an x ray they'd find abcesses like grapes on every root in my head! I think your trouble comes as much from feeling up in the air, and consequently overdoing in the effort to forget your private worries, as from abcesses on the teeth. Once you get rid of the farm, and get a feasible plan of life laid out, you'll be a new woman. I know I'd be, if I cd. do the same! This farm is a burden, and much as I squirm at selling it, I know it ought to be done now while Im able to undertake it. When did you rise up & go to Ohio, for heaven's sake? Are you bent on suicide?? Do you mean to tell me that ear is well already? - and with your neuritis, too! Is the spirit tormenting you that you are so merciless to the body? You say you are going out to Juniper Lodge April 5. Of course you will take the maids. You spoke as tho you were going sola, which would, I fear, be dreary enough. If you have the maids, it would be rather thrilling to spend April and May there. It seems killing to me to think of the Antis seeking H.T.U. & M.W.P. as orators at a Madison Sq. meeting along with Mary Pickford!! The picture of Our Mary posing modestly before the footlights and beaming at the gallery somehow doesnt harmonize with Maud's intellectual assault upon the masses in the orchestra, and Harriets side-splitting attack upon the pockets of the whole house -- for of course they want her to make the collection speech. Id give a pretty penny to observe Mary P-- while HTU [was] is speaking. She ought to look "like some lone watcher of the skies when a new planet swims into his Ken." Dear Pandora, Ive been stuck twice since writing you last. -- not the fault of driver or car. The spring thaw softened the drifts last week, and while I was going along on an errand of mercy, bearing food and flowers to the sick, I suddenly cut down into the slush on one side, and couldnt get out. I borrowed a shovel of an aged widow, the only inhabitant thereabouts, and shoveled till a man came along and pushed, & so was extricated. The last time - so far - was today when I got stuck in the mud in front of our barn! I broke both chains on the hind wheels. Really the roads are a sight. - the snow has been very deep all winter, and it has gone suddenly under a warm rain. It has been a momentous week, with the crisis over Germany's entrance into the League, and the row over Houghton's alleged observations thereupon. The prime joke of the affair was the exasperated accusation of the U.S. as being the instigator of Brazil's contumacy, made by one of the French papers. It took some rage to think that up. My sister-in-law has been sounding me out about going abroad for a year, beginning next August. I thought about where we might go, and there isnt a single country except China where they have a kind word for America!! - and in China one is apt to be shot either by accident or design. I dont relish going where I have to hear continual criticism of my country. Besides, there is something to be said on the other side. Whether Houghton said it or not, it is true that this League performance seems to prove Europe incapable of learning anything new. However, it may be that this upset may do good. If it eliminates Chamberlain, that will be something. He seems a dull sort of creature, quite unfit to bear the weight of international responsibility. Lady Astor altho not a heavy weight in intellect wd. have had more sense than he had, - while when I think of what you would do in a position of that kind, I gnash my teeth in unavailing regret. I hope it didnt bore you to peruse Barnum. It seemed to me a diverting volume, but one never knows how books are going to strike other people. Im still leisurly getting on with the "Travel Diary", and tho the Prussian in Keyserling occasionally breaks thru, for the most part it is extremely original and arresting. Are you thru sitting for the portrait? I am filled with eagerness to see it. I hope to goodness it is like you, but I have a forboding it wont be. It would be just like it to be a "work of art", resembling nobody whatever, but being done according to all the latest notions. Ive been using the typewriter till Ive got writers cramp in the temperate zone of my back - just below shoulder blades! One of my cats has got the mange. I've washed it & anointed it for a month, and presently I am going to shoot it. This is no empty threat. I am playing with the idea of going to St. Louis. I dont know whether it will materialize. I dont know why I go, except to see you and a few others. If you didnt go, I wdnt think for a moment of trailing out there. I was in St. Louis when Tennessee ratified the Fed. Amdt. I was there in the Warwick Hotel with you at the time of the Democratic Nat. Convention in 1916, when we paraded in the rain and Dr. DeBey having fortified herself a drop too much felt the urge to march with the N A W S A Board!! Well, they were great old days. I'm glad we're thru marching, tho. Good night, beloved Chief. I wish you renewed health. Indeed I do! Give my best to Miss Hay. Ever yours - MGP. [*1928*] After tomorrow - Saturday - I return 333 Reeder St. Easton Pa Friday night HOTEL LINCOLN EIGHTH AVENUE 44TH TO 45TH STREET TIMES SQUARE NEW YORK TELEPHONE LACKAWANNA 1400 ROOMS 1400 1400 BATHS 1400 SERVIDORS CABLE ADDRESS "COLNLIN" NEWYORK JAMES T. CLYDE, MANAGING DIRECTOR Well, dear Pandora, you have taken the last hurdle in the long race. The winning part will come next. You put thru your friendship as you do everything else, in the grand style and to the finish. And though it may sound like Job's comforters to say it, - you can stand being left better than Miss Hay could. She would have been lost indeed, while you have avenues of mental escape from loneliness. We wondered at your courage and poise today, and I hope you felt supported by the fervent affection and devotion of your Old Guard. It should have been palpable in the very air. Your friends are eager to help tide you over these first weeks. Im a believer in not trying to rush matters. Things usually settle themselves if you give them time. While yours are settling, if you want much or little of my priceless society, you can have it freely. My steamer sails the 27th. If you want me to postpone sailing I can do it without turning a hair. Just speak the word. You know how I should prize being with you, and you might do worse you know! But I may as well confess something. For 40 yrs. Ive refrained from cutting my hair because of my family. Since I sold the farm, Ive been trembling on the verge, but my sister-in-laws crook about how awful it wd. be to have to go around with me detained me till night before last, when tossing on a sleepless bed it suddenly came to me that if a woman 60 yrs. old wanted to have her hair cut, whose business was it anyway, by gum? And I got up next morning & had it cut after my sister had left the hotel to go shopping. After it was off, I cdnt keep it in place, so I had a permanent wave put in, and now I look like a clipt poodle dog! When my sister got back, I met her with a quotation, "Shoot if you must this old grey head!" If she'd had a gun, she'd have shot all right. I tell you this to prepare you for the shock thats coming to you. Good night, darling, beautiful, glorious, priceless, peerless, unutterably precious Pandora, (I said a true mouthful that time) Ever yours, MGP Tuesday March 20, 1928 Dearest beloved Pandora :- It was pretty kind of you to write that beautiful and touching letter. I have reread it many times until I could repeat it from memory. I did not expect it, for I knew you were on your way back north early in March, and perhaps never wd. get the paper I sent. And even if you did, there was no reason why you had to keep condoling with me in my calamities. When I am in trouble, I'm in a lot of it, and it is trying to my friends, Im afraid. Well, the worst seems over. Poor Elizas illness and death hit me worst. She was the last tie to my old home, and had been all her life a faithful friend to all of us. They dont make her kind any more, and they dont make families and homes like this old one any more. There is something gone out of the world, and as you well said we are happy to have been born when we were, before it vanished. I've got to stay on a while, being executor of Eliza's will which I havent had time until now to take out letters testamentary on. The auction was a holy show. God gave us a sunny day, and the bottom fell out of the road. There was a long procession of cars which completed the ruin of the highway. Those which came early got thru all right. The late comers stuck in the mud. One "swell car" with a radiant female driving it stuck fast at the bottom of Caywards Hill & Lee Wyneth had to come with his team & haul her backwards up the hill back to the stone road, where she turned round & went back where she came from. There was much speculation as to who she might be. I didnt recognize any acquaintance in the romantic description of her chorus. Many left their cars at the stone road and walked down the half mile to our house, lugging their purchases back with them as best they might. Everybody was kindness itself and their evident genuine sympathy and sorrow to see this old landmark passing to strangers, or if not that, to new owners, softened the ordeal greatly. The auctioneer should be doing a turn on the vaudeville stage! He had lungs of leather and a throat of brass. Viewed impersonally, the sale 2 was extremely entertaining. My sister-in-law had been with me helping sort out stuff to be sold for the two weeks preceding. One day she came down from the attic with a whales vertebra in her hand, as I supposed for the bonfire. But she refused to destroy it, saying somebody would come to the auction for the express purpose of acquiring part of a whale! -- And sure enough, George Clarke, a collector of indian relics, spotted that bone and there being no competition bid it in for fifteen cents!! Charlotte Sargent, the village doctors wife & an old schoolmate, came to me after an altercation with the cashier, another old schoolmate. Said she, "Mary, did you hear me bid on this dish?" I said I had. "Do you remember what I bid?" I said I seemed to remember it was 25 cts. "Well, you come and tell Frank Whitney where to get off." So I went with her, supposing her bid had been raised on the tally sheet by the clerk. When I got to the Cashier I nearly died! He had refused to let Charlotte pay more than the 15 cts with which she was charged on the tally sheet for her dish, and they had nearly come to blows. You ought to have had an auction!! It would have amused you. I thought it was going to be horrible, but when I saw all that junk which our family had collected in the course of 125 years [collected] assembled in the open, my only fear was that nobody would take it off my hands. But they licked it up clean, even to Deacon Ezra Jones' hand-made wooden sap-tubs! We netted between $1000 & $1200, and I have kept all the things of any real value. How the auctioneer ever got thru all the stuff in one afternoon passes comprehension. Dear Pandora, I am grieved at your saying you are in wretched condition "physically, mentally & morally." Never mind the mental & moral part, but tell me what's the matter physically? Why dont you come to Clifton & get the misery taken out of you? It isnt well to let things drift. They give me a very painstaking & thoro examination and they are noted for their care in prescribing diet. They give little medicine, often none at all. Two weeks might help you. Why not try it? Perhaps I am selfish in wanting you here, for I love to see you terribly, but aside from that, I wish you had a scientific diagnosis based on adequate examination. Good night. You have made this empty & lonely house bearable these last days before I go away from it. Thank you, my dear! I shall stay on a couple of weeks longer, then go to my sister-in-law at Easton for the summer. Ever yours, dear Pandora - MGP 333 Reader St. Easton, Pa May 26 1928 Dear Pandora :- I've read The Am. Caravan, and perhaps that was the book you spoke of sending me, so dont! Its a pleasure to know your garden isnt planted, because I wouldnt like to know anybody like you was living in an environment which wasnt perfectly harmonious! Now, - with one black and one white library wall, no floor, no heater, no electricity (city electricity I mean, for of course you yourself are as inexhaustible dynamo), it would be distinctly inappropriate to have one perfectly beautiful and consoling thing about you. For that reason, I congratulate you on having a balky garden. As long as you are in a mess, be thankful that it is complete!! That is all that sustained me this past spring. Everything was perfect -- in its way. Im now reading Mme De [Sepgnes] Sevignes Life & Letters. To think anybody could have achieved immortality by writing letters! And theres Lady Mary Wortley Montague. But then, both of them had great personages and scandalous gossip to write about. Which reminds me --- if you want a beautiful quarter hour, read "Night on a Great Beach", in the June Atlantic Monthly. It is priceless. Last Sunday, Mary Gray's (my niece) swain was here from Princeton, where he is teaching & getting a PhD., and we all went for a drive in the afternoon. When we were well away from civilization going down a long hill the steering arm broke, and we settled gently over into the gutter. Mary's swain lit out to get help. The three females sat in the gutter 4 hours while help was being stirred up. (By the way, it wasnt my car we were riding in, thank John!) Finally, we got our car salvaged by a wrecking outfit and the swain beat it into Easton, rummaged in my bureau drawers to find a purse that I had told him was on my table -- where he finally found it, on the table I mean -- got my garage & auto keys & drove my car back to get us, and we all came galumphing back to the house at midnight, starved and ugly. If I've told you this before, forget it! Ive written about it to somebody, but Ive no idea who. We have been deep in plans for foreign travel, have tentatively engaged passage for England Sept. 27 or Oct. 4 next, expect to spend the winter in Italy, Sicily and South France. They are all new to me. My niece & I plan to look at 2 all the Piltdown and Cro-Magnon artists performances in flints and cave drawings. Ive always yearned to look upon a real cave-man's abode and see how good those drawings of cave mammoths and so-hippuses really are. We have just read Henry Fairfield Osbornes latest book about all the latest finds. Then the Greek and Roman remains always strike an answering chord in my breast. It remains to be seen whether my sister-in-law can keep her mouth shut in Italy, or whether she will land us all in jail for lese majeste, re Mussolini! Ever have a fallen meta-tarsal? One of mine has fell. Ive had a devil of a time with a cramp in one toe because of the fall, but I have found a remedy. If you have trouble, let me know. Ive had other vague and indeterminate miseries both mental and physical, but at last begin to feel like a human being again. I wonder if you are spent with all your confusions and delays and the million vexations which must beat down on your spirit like blows on the anvil. Are you very tired? -- a fool question! What I mean is, can you stand it? Again let me suggest that some night when you go to bed you read Night on a Great Beach. Unless I greatly mistake, you will feel amply rewarded. Do you go to New York on any special days? I go occasionally and Id like to strike your day if you have one. Just wd. like to lay an eye on you and see if you are as wonderful as ever. Tomorrow we motor down to Princeton to spend the day with some relatives. I hear you have a new car and a new chauffeur. I am sure you will find it a great comfort and recreation to get away from things and let the wind blow thru your mind. But I do hope he is a safe driver! We dont want to hear of you in any more smash-ups. I miss hearing from or about you. Dont starve me into insensibility. You will get Napoleon in a day or two. If you can get time to read it, you will be much surprized and deeply astonished. Anyhow, I was. Especially I was struck with the last quarter of the book, -- the years at St. Helena. Usually one thinks of Napoleon's career as ended at Waterloo, but his own comments and reflections on that career, when he had time to think things over, seem to me the most significant criticism ever penned, and his spiritual development at the end, his struggle to meet his fate patiently, are unforgettable. Ever, dearest Pandora, your devoted MGP 333 Reeder St. Easton Pa July 17, 1928 Pandora Dear: - I returned here yesterday afternoon, after a last lovely three days at the White Springs Farm, where Daisy Lewis keeps a heaven of her own running without a hitch. I do wish you could have been there to see the gardens, the cherry orchards, the hayfields, the lake etc. But you are doing a noble work showing the world how housewives can work 8 hours a day and get it all done. Daisy is awaiting your monograph with eager anticipation, as she says she can hardly pull thru her daily stunt on 16 hrs a day. I found your letter written here before you went to Chautauqua, and which Cora didnt forward because she kept thinking I was coming back. She didnt know where I was some of the time. (I didnt tell her I was going to Chautauqua.) I never know definitely how long I'm going to be away when I leave home. It is better not to know! If you want to stay, stay. If you dont, dont. Whats the use to have to fill out visits made before you knew whether you were going to enjoy staying or preferred to skip out the day you got there? It was great to see you in Chautauqua, and to see your pluck and glorious ability to hold an audience's attention as long as you cared to talk to 'em. That hour and a half you held our noses to the grindstone, the evening you gave your Peace speech, was the shortest hour and a half I remember. I wdnt. have believed it if Alice Clement hadnt timed you. But thus it was, unless her watch gained time. Now then, about Williamstown. Id. love to take you thither in my little Victoria. Its a comfortable car, and I think we could have fun driving up. We would have to spend a night on the way up, perhaps. I dont know how far it is from New Rochelle. I think 175 miles a day is about all I can drive without getting sleepy! I tell you these things so that you may know the worst. I dont know whether I can get in to the Institute. -- whether I am worthy to associate with your crowd of cosmic-minded archangels. Perhaps you have to have pull to get admitted. [How long does] [it last?] What is it about this year? How long does it last? Anyhow,if I cdnt get in, I could run you up there while you were coming to after your article Quebec can accommodate itself to Williamstown. Hopefully --- M.G.P. Please thank Mrs. Jones for her biological & archaeological letter. I will write her when I get caught up with my correspondence a little. --- 2 AMERICAN MERCHANT LINES S. S. Thur. Oct. 4. 1928 The first three days of this passage were the calm ones. Then off the Banks we ran into a So'wester, and from that, Monday, we ran into a Nor'wester, which has blown us along for three days, at anywhere from 75 to 102 miles an hour. The Captain said it was the worst sea he'd seen in 15 yrs. A "Ripsnorter" he called it. My sister was tipped over back onto the floor in her chair at table in the dining room. It didnt hurt her, thanks be! Her sister Mrs. Chapman, was flung headlong on the floor this morning in the drawing room, also without injury. Several other passengers have not escaped so easily. One nearly had her neck broken, and another had her spine injured. I want to thank you for the collapsible and the lovely box with books, and for the delicious nuts browned to a turn by the fair hand of Alda. When I think of these last, my soul is filled with resentment. When I first found the nuts, like a fool I passed them round. Jessie Chapman had some, and passed hers. Nobody liked hers. Everybody liked mine, and when I was seasick during the storm, those two cormorants, the girls, got my nuts and devoured them, all but 4 1/2 nuts which I sadly abstracted from the bottom of the can but now. Well, I trust that this sad tale of misapplied nuts will net me a fresh lot another time. And if I ever get any more, they stay under lock and key! I was seasick -- not violently because I staid in my berth & had what food I could manage brought to me, for 48 hrs. Then, like the Phoenix, I rose from my ashes and have been glorying in the sight of Old Atlantic ripsnorting around. We got two SOS calls yesterday, one freighter was afire and finally sank. Her crew of 45 taking to their lifeboats. The other was a passenger steamer which was disabled. We were not so near as other steamers & so didnt go to their help. The American Farmer, another ship of this line en route for N.Y. tried to go to them, but the Chief Engineer with a grin on his face said, "I guess she didnt get very far. The last I heard she was going backwards trying to keep headed for N. York. With a boat going 18 knots and a wind blowing against her 90 miles an hour, she's lucky if she dont get blown against Ireland!!" Lots of atmosphere here. Our room steward, a N. Hampshire chap, when a High School student, threw a Webster's Unabridged dictionary at the Principal, jumped out the window, boarded a freight train and went to Portland, shipped on a cattle steamer and has been at sea ever since, 15 years. He used to gamble 24 hrs at a stretch. In 1922 he won $800 at a single game, swore off gambling then & there, took his money, added it to $750 savings, and took a six months tour of Europe. hasnt touched a card since. Then we have a fellow just down from Baffus Bay, in the Arctic, where he was stationed by the Hudsons Bay Co. He is suffering greatly from the heat!! He says when the Eskimo hunters come home from a hunting trip with their sealskin boots all frozen & water soaked & stiff, they haul 'em off and throw them to their wives, who set to work and chew them dry and flexible as chamois again!! When the wives get to the age of 40 yrs, their front teeth are worn down to the gums. -- a mark of respectability in the community. This is enough for this time. Once more, thank you, beloved Pandora for the steamer letter, and especially for that lovely week with you. I never shall forget either. [Please give the enclosed] Ive written Alda [note to Alda] separate letter. Good bye, courage, Pandora! Come to Berlin! We'll have a bat as is a bat! TELE GRAMS PHONE 24343 GROSVENOR HOTEL, EDINBURGH. NOT OFFICIAL Oct 12, 1928 Well, dearest Chief, these words are sent to you from Edinburgh. A letter this AM from Clara H. break to me the miserable news that you have had an abcess in your good ear! What a time of pain and wretchedness you must have had. I cant tell you what sympathy I feel. I had one in one ear, once, at the end of a lecture tour, and didnt get over it for 6 months! I hope yours was not that kind. Clara also said the chaise longue had been delivered to you from Wanamaker's. Apparently they failed to deliver my note along with it, or perhaps I misunderstood Clara. I wanted you to have my gift for your coming birthday anniversary now when you need it, dear Pandora, and I am glad to know you have been using it. I gather that it fits. I wish I could come in at frequent intervals and read the news to you, and chat. I had a letter from Rosa Mawes on my arrival here inviting me to go as "American Delegate" to a Conference on Disarmament in Dresden the latter part of this month. I hardly felt like accepting as nobody but Rosa seemed disposed to crown me with credentials, nor do I know exactly what I might be supposed to represent. Perhaps you!! That wd. be worth travelling to Dresden for, but since it is doubtful whether you might not shoot me for going. I said I couldnt go. But I shd. have liked to go and hear it thru. We arrived in London last Sunday about noon, staid till Tues. morning, then started north, stopping at Lincoln, York, Durham on the way here, where we arrived yesterday in a pouring rain. Today has been fine, and this glorious old city has been at its best [today]. It certainly in a noble town, and if I were a Scotsman, I would burst with pride every time I walked down Prince's St. The sky line from the Castle along the heights of the Old City, with the Queens Crags behind, towering over them [are] is matchless, and the effect of the sun striking across the crags in long rays slanting 2 TELE GRAMS PHONE 24343 GROSVENOR HOTEL, EDINBURGH. to the ground recalls all the romantic past in which this region abounds. "The splendor falls on castle walls." etc Last night, I went for a walk with the girls after we got settled in our hotel. It was about 8:30. We stopt in a drug store to get a tooth brush. "I'm sorry", said the clerk, "but I cant sell you a tooth brush between 6 o'clock and midnight. We can only sell medicines between those hours. I can sell you the brush tomorrow morning." "I'll return at midnight", I told him, as we departed, whereat he laughed loud and long. Scotchmen seem much taller and bigger than Englishmen. There is one very imposing old lady staying here, tall and imperious, slightly lame, like a dowager duchess. To my amazement I caught her this morning eating marmalade quite calmly with her knife. A man from Newcastle tells us trade in that city is going from bad to worse, and they fear the town is not going to come back. "Nobody wants our coal any more", he said. "It is too costly." We see in the papers much talk about emigration to Canada, but Canada doesnt want immigrants who come helpless and penniless, and there is great argument about how much England shall do for those she exports, and how many Canada will take and what she will do for them after they get there. An English army officer says he is living on the continent and renting his estate [I] in England to escape the income tax. At this moment there are one and one third million people out of employment, and of these the great majority who get the dole are [women] men. Only a tenth or or less on the dole are women. They are trying to get women into outdoor occupations. The Countess of Warwick, long an interesting figure in social experiment, is starting a venture in 3 TELE GRAMS PHONE 24343 GROSVENOR HOTEL, EDINBURGH. farming and stock raising to be run by women. So far I havent heard a word about chicken farming. As for general farming, I dont see how they ever get any grain dry enough to stack, and yet everywhere you see snug little stacks of wheat and oats with thatched tops in symmetrical groups about the farm buildings. My tenant used to tell me how they had to wait sometimes six weeks before they could get their grain in out of the field, after it was cut, the rain was so continuous. I should think it ought to be threshed by this time, but apparently they think otherwise. The scarcity of autos and the swarms of bicycles is the most striking thing to mention about the roads. As to the pedestrians, lots of the women wear regular rubber boots, like mens, whereas I havent seen a single low rubber, either in use or in a show window. The policemen here in Edinburgh generally have poor teeth. The general appearance of the citizens, however, is more robust than that of the English in London. It is rather pitiful to see the undersized, undernourisht men in London carrying on. A grey haired one-armed porter who took charge of our luggage for us quite wrung my heart. He did as much with his one arm as most men with two, but the veins stood out on his forehead and he was out of breath when he finally got us loaded into our cabs. Next Wed. we start southward, thru the English Lake Country, Wales, Exeter Bath etc to Devon, Cornwall, Lands End, perhaps the Scilly Isles. Then the South of England, coming back to London about Nov. 1st for a stay of a week or two. I think England is a great country, and never have I been so struck with the staying power of the English people as right now. We went to St. 4 TELE GRAMS PHONE 24343 GROSVENOR HOTEL, EDINBURGH. St. Pauls, last Sun. night, thinking it wd be easy to get seats, and therefore going late. When we got there, the place was packed to the doors, & we had to stand! Fancy a church in America as large as St. Pauls with standing room only. True, the Bishop of Liverpool was speaking, but he was the dullest orator even England seems able to cough up, and yet there they all sat as attentive as the pearls of wisdom were dropping in their laps. I crossed the street today sprinting along in front of a mangy little car that was bent on my destruction. There was a policeman in the middle of the street and I made for him in a surprizing burst of speed. He held out his arms and I rusht into them. He folded me in, and started to bawl out the driver of the murderous car. "Do ye mean to chase the lady down, now," he began, and then he and the driver looked down at me hanging onto him, like a leech, and broke forth in a shout of laughter. My sister, on the sidewalk was doubled up likewise. Dear Pandora, you must be tired of this pitter - patter. If you only knew how often I think of you, you'd wonder how I ever think of anything else! I am so anxious to hear you are improving, to know just what you are doing, but I do not ask you to write. I know you have little strength for unnecessary things. Perhaps Alda will drop me a line, once in a while. You must be good, beloved Pandora, and not exhaust your strength as fast as it accumulates, let it grow into a reserve. Doubtless it is good for you to keep your mind occupied, only not to the point of weariness. Remember you are very precious to all who are working for a new and better world. As you have known these many years, you are the most precious thing in the world to me. Ever yours, Mary Chester, October 21, 1928 Dearest Pandora :- No word from you for an interminable time, and your last letter a sad one. I hoped for a word perhaps in Edinburgh, but we got the latest mail forwarded from London just before leaving. The last I heard from Clara you had a second abcess in the hitherto sound ear. We wont get any more mail till we get back to London, as we are now on tour in our own rented car and chauffeur. Very grand we are, in our 7 passenger vehicle, with a rack on top for our luggage. The driver sits in his own compartment, which one of us shares with him, as it is the nicest seat in the car. The glass window separating him from the passengers behind slides back and forth so we can communicate if we wish. We squeeze a bulb, and he opens his window and listens, and says "Yes, madam, thank you, madam" and shuts it again. He is propriety itself, and is frequently embarrassed by his inability to understand the American language. Today is my 61st birthday, and they promoted me to ride with him from Kendal to Chester. We finisht the Lake District this Sabbath morning, and a beautiful region it is. While we were in Carlisle we drove out along the Roman Wall to a Roman permanent camp, the wall and a deep vallum or moat being on either side of the road for several miles. It was a hilly country, inhabited principally by sheep and collie dogs. One stood in the deserted camp on top of a bold promontory, at the foot of which a river swung round in a wide curve, looked off over the bare hills of Scotland, and imagined what those homesick Legionaries [must] from Gaul, Iberia, Africa or Germany must have felt during the long exile in this forbidding land. Of course the Picts and Scots kept them from boredom in one way. There were permanent Roman walled camps every 18 miles along the whole distance of the wall from Carlisle to Newcastle, and towers holding garrisons every mile of that distance, with watchmen every hour of day and night patrolling the border. But the wild northern tribes broke thru in spite of all they could do, and harried and burned and robbed the British inside & got away again, or massacred a garrison from time to time. They were a pesky lot. Certainly some races are not to be conquered. Nature endows them with indomitable "self-determination." The Scotch never could be reduced to the state of the Hindus or Javanese or negroes or Mexican Indians. Why is it the Irish, equally indomitable, are so much more improvident and shiftless? October 22. Caernarvon, Wales. Well, this has been a day of days. We staid all night in Chester. This morning was gloriously sunny and warm. We went first to the Cathedral, a beautiful Old Red Sandstone structure begun by William Rufus - on a Saxon site, wh. in turn was on a Druid site, world without end, Amen! They were starting a coal fire in a stove back in the Lady Chapel and it smoked and the smoke curling up into the nave, with the long bars of colored light from the windows striking thru it made a most beautiful effect. -- as if the censers of 700 years were swinging. Before I forget it -- my sister and I were sitting one morning in the Scottish Nat'l Gallery in Edinburgh resting from our labors, when a woman approached with outstretched hand and an American smile on her face, and who should it be but Mrs. Wendell Bush! She was in Edinburgh piloting Wendell around on his first visit there. They were visiting Truman's wife's relations who are connected with the University there. To come back to my journal -- After a crowded half day in Chester we started in our car around the coast of North Wales, thru Hawarden where Gladstone lived and died, striking the coast at Colwyn Bay and taking a perfectly superb road We have driven thru more flocks of sheep and herds of cattle in Scotland and Wales than we have ever seen in all our lives before. In Scotland, the flocks were large -- that is from 100 to 300. In Wales they are small, from 1 to 2 dozen generally. The coal region, stretching diagonally across England from Newcastle down into Wales, studded with industrial cities, steel and textile, is in deep depression. The mines are partly closed down, the mills not running full force, and some of the mills are asking the workers to accept a 10% reduction in wages as an alternative to closing down entirely. I have been greatly impressed with the dwindling physique of the English. They look smaller than they did 20 years ago, and you cant go ten feet without striking a public house. It certainly is a land flowing with booze. Ethel Snowden spoke at a big temperance meeting somewhere in the Midlands not long ago. We read report of speech in Manchester Guardian, and she referred to the increase in popular wealth and national efficiency in the U.S.A. since prohibition. It seems to me, however, that it is due as much to the draining of the best blood of England to the Colonies, and her terrible centuries of depletion by war, and the dreadful life of grime and smoke in the mill towns, that her population is feeling below par, as it is to drink. Everything has combined to weaken her people, and how they have borne up under their burdens passes me. Good night, Pandora. I wish I could talk with you. Id say things I never have said. Somehow I feel I could say them quite simply, my dearest. I love you ardently, beloved Pandora. Barrie says every Scotchman stops once a day, leans up against something and for 1 whole minute thinks concentratedly about Mary Queen of Scots. Well, I do that about you, not once but several times every blessed day of my life. Now Good night, Sweet dreams --- M.G.P. 2 cut into the wild crags which jut out into the sea in promontory after promontory from there to Llandudno, then to Conway Castle, a stupendous fortress built by Edward I. My niece is hipt on castles, so we are visiting all available. Conway Castle is about the most elaborate one, which was a real working castle, and not a place to give parties to Queen Elizabeth in, which I have yet seen. It is dismantled, but not crumbling. Its vast walls and towers and battlements are as sound as tho just built. There is a striking place called Plas Mawr (Old Palace) not far from the Castle which Queen Elizabeth liked to run away to. She abducted Leicester [???ther] in the first flush of their romance, and it is said they had their honey moon there. It must have been an excellent place, being remote from the prying eyes of the court, and a charming and retired old pile even today. "E. R." is everywhere in carving and molded in the plaster ceilings. Then there is a weird new wing built on, called the Victoria Room, with three hopeless oil pictures in it, and a Gentleman's Lavatory off from one end!! Victoria was no scrub of a Queen, but she certainly should not be brought into juxtaposition to Eliza Regina, Great Gloriana, Queene of Faerie. It makes her look very commonplace, for Elizabeth was a mouth full, and earfull, and an eyefull in the most gorgeous of periods, and she filled the stage gallantly. Tomorrow morning we go thru Caernarvon Castle, built by the same famous architect as Conway Castle. Here is where each Prince of Wales is invested with his title on attaining his majority. Before he comes of age, he is only Duke of Cornwall by rights. Anyhow, this information was handed out to my niece by an erudite Welshman today at Conway Castle. TELEGRAMS, COUNTY HOTEL, SALISBURY. TEL.NO 150 SALISBURY. Oct. 28. 1928 COUNTY HOTEL, SALISBURY. Dear Pandora :- This looks like destitution, writing from a County Hotel, but it really is a very comfortable place, no relation to our idea of a County Home. We went out to Stonehenge, this afternoon, and it is certainly remarkable, tho I was not as impresst as most travelers allege themselves to be. Have you been here? The guide said archaeologists say it is much earlier than Druid times. There is a spacious circular terrace, marked around the edge with white markers at intervals of 15 ft. Each one is over a spot where charred human bones have been found. At East side of terrace the elaborate and involved circles of stones are placed, the largest brought 20 miles to the place where they are erected. The rising sun on June 21st shines directly thru the main entrance, falling on what is supposed to be the Altar stone. There is an excavation going on at another stone age site about 2 miles distant from Stonehenge, where our chauffeur says a wood copy of Stonehenge has been found. Visitors not allowed, and besides it being Sunday today, we didnt try to visit the latter place. I dont know any more about it than this. Perhaps the circles were of oak tree- trunks, which have been imbedded in the soil and lasted in part. It is a chalk region, and wood may have been partially fossilized in the lime soil. I am pining to hear from you, dear Pandora. Not a word, except a letter from Clara, mailed Oct. 12 rec'd in London Oct. 23. -- not very fast mail. -- in which she told about the Town Hall Memorial meeting, and said you seemed better than you had of late. It may have been merely because you braced up for a trying ordeal. The reports in the London papers about the American presidential campaign are merely gossippy rehashes of reportorial wise cracks! Owen Young and Senator Norris's coming out for Smith is the only news amounting to anything up to date. They say Hoover isnt doing a thing, and Smith 2 TELEGRAMS, COUNTY HOTEL, SALISBURY. TEL.NO150 SALISBURY. doing everything humanly possible to win the election COUNTY HOTEL, SALISBURY. but prophesy that Hoover will win. The only smart thing said so far is that the Democrats call Hoover a fat Coolidge, and the Republicans retort that that is just what they want!! Our motor trip ends day after tomorrow at London. We stay two weeks in London, then go to Paris. Our address will be, after Nov. 15 c/o Am. Express Co. 11 Rue Scribe, Paris. I do wish you'd write just a line, I feel deeply concerned about you. If you dont feel like writing, perhaps Miss Wilson would! or Miss Wald or Mabel Russell, but for heaven's sake, please somebody rise up and tell me how you are getting along or I shall lose my feeble remnants of a mind. How charming the English country villages are, but if they had much motor traffic, it would be pretty awful driving. In one place we had to stop and back before we could make a turn. How the big buses do it is a mystery. Every body in our party takes turns riding in all the seats, and all except me have had hard colds! I started out clad in heavy woolens from top to toe, but I suppose my turn will come. When I get to London I hope to have more to write about. I fear you dont care whether I write or not!! I enclose a little packet of wall-flower seed I collected from a plant growing on the wall of the ruined Glastonbury Abbey. You might like to start them in the green house and transplant them into the garden next spring. Jessie Chapman says she started some in a cold frame in the fall, on Staten Island, and they bloomed the following summer very profusely, but that after that they never could be made to bloom again. They have a delicious odor, I believe. Good bye, dear Pandora. Best regards to A. W. - And do write a line. --- Mary TELEPHONE: REGENT 7000 (25 LINES) TELEGRAMS: "UNTIPPABLE,PICCY,LONDON." CODE: WESTERN UNION. October 30. 1928 REGENT PALACE HOTEL, PICCADILLY CIRCUS LONDON, W.1. Dearest Pandora: - Returned to London this afternoon after a very interesting 3 weeks of incessant travel. This hotel is centrally located, has several attractive features, but is crowded and noisy. I imagine we will not linger in it much of the time. I still am holding the record in our party for not having a cold. It was a great relief to find a letter from you on our arrival. I was much upset not to get a line in Plymouth, for I feared you were ill. Not that this letter is particularly roseate. One doesnt like to meditate on uric acid in the blood stream Tho' where else would it be? Its got to get around somehow. If only you'd be extra good and let me know what the doctors say about the xray and blood test exams. I would be unspeakably grateful. Not that I think these things amount to a whole lot. But one likes to know what they think they might have seen!! I was much interested in your graphic account of the Greek lady. She must have been a real sensation, and how she manages to keep warm in winter in the kind of garb you describe passes me. I wonder how people have the nerve to go around looking unlike their fellows. You neglected to say whether or not you admired the style she had resurrected. It sounded comfortable, except that it was draughty. This afternoon we stopt at Hampton Court on our way to London, and it was as beautiful as in the days when Wolsey lived there. – the Thames a clean, sparkling blue stream, with swans galore swimming along it as in the days of Edmund Spenser, or even the far-off times of Chaucer. The Palace is one of my favorite spots, and the fine gardens and parks were lovely even at this late date. – tree roses full of wonderful bloom. I was desirous of staying with the fine Holbeins. Which reminds me of the wonderful Sir Thomas More in the National Gallery at Edinburgh, one of the portraits that make one feel that they know personally the subject. It is a strong face, full of feeling, full of 2 REGENT PALACE HOTEL, PICCADILLY CIRCUS, LONDON, W.1. TELEPHONE: REGENT 7000 (25 LINES) TELEGRAMS: "UNTIPPABLE,PICCY,LONDON." CODE: WESTERN UNION foreboding, full of vitality, with a fine nobility and discipline in every line. There is a rapt intentness in the eyes, such as one would expect in the author of "Utopia". – One of the most disreputable portraits in Hampton Court was probably a lifelike representation of Francis I of France – the prince whom Henry VIII met on the Field of Cloth of Gold" – and his second wife. They both looked as if they were trying to sober up and couldnt quite make it! A meaner leer than Francis' wd. be hard to find. – unless it were the hard, coarse, thin-lipped countenance of Henry VIII. I wonder some one didnt shoot or stab him! It is interesting to see the portraits of him and Elizabeth side by side. – the daughter so like and so unlike the father. She was a regal, if not magnetic creature, while he was a regular old John Bull. To come down to the present, did I tell you Reed, our chauffeur, says one can make a bargain to rent a car and chauffeur for any period up to 3 years, -- the car to be kept in garage & in good condition, the chauffeur to be kept in good condition livery, and both car and chauffeur at exclusive service of the employer for a stated sum? Just like having your private car, only when the time expires you are free of it. It seems an awfully good plan to me. Well, they certainly moved heaven and earth to get you to broadcast, didnt they? And it was a good job, only it must have been a nuisance to you to have all that tearing around in the house. -- And I am terribly pleased to know you like the chaise longue. I was getting the idea that you were affronted at the presumption of giving you furniture, and was about convinced it was too long or too short or too narrow or too soft -- like the giver!! I hope you will take what comfort you may out of it, -- as much as your loving letters have given me. I guess here is a good place to stop, beloved Pandora. My whole heart goes out to you many times a day. Mary. Nov. 9. 1928 REGENT PALACE HOTEL, PICCADILLY CIRCUS, LONDON, W. 1. TELEPHONE: REGENT 7000 (25 LINES) TELEGRAMS: "UNTIPPABLE,PICCY,LONDON." CODE: WESTERN UNION. Beloved Chief: -- Today is the day of the Lord Mayor's Show. I tried to see it with my niece. We were due at a luncheon at 1 P.M. and the show was supposed to start at 11.40. All we accomplisht was to get into an awful mob, and work like mad for 10 minutes to get out of it again! Then we took the tube to go to our luncheon, in the delusion that we could gain time thereby. We took an exhaustive but involuntary course in the subterranean map of London. Finally when all hope of ever getting up out of the bowels of the earth to look upon the sun again had disappeared, we emerged to find ourselves out in the country. So we returned to the now familiar "brown air" of the lower [world] regions, a phrase of Dante's which I now appreciate as never before, and spent the rest of our money retracing our steps, and traversing new and untried sections of this extensive and incomprehensible nether world. Far be it from me to criticise any subway system after having wandered like a lost soul in the subways of New York, but if anything could be worse, it is the underground in London. We got to our luncheon more dead than alive, and it seemed to me that our English acquaintances lacked that air of respect to which I am accustomed in my listeners when I relate a sorrowful tale! They looked to me as if they thought we were a couple of darned fools! I spent the week end at Sheringham, a town near Norwich on the East Coast, visiting Frances Potter's niece who married an English clergyman. They have two very bright children, and Elizabeth has become quite Anglicized. They have all the windows open and a raw 2 gale sweeps in from the North Sea thru the house continually. I saw an oil stove in the hall and appropriated it, carrying it with me from room to room when I found they were particularly large or more drafty than usual. They gave me an extra meal in this house, the maid bringing me two thin slices of bread & butter and a cup of tea when she called me in the morning. That brought the meals I ate there up to 5 per day. But that did not equal what the Watts gave me in Plymouth. I told you about what we did in the way of eating there. Did I tell you there is a fad for rubber boots in the provinces? All the younger women wear them in rainy weather, regular rubber boots to the knee, all colors, and a sensible thing too. Also there is a weird costume young school misses wear of navy blue belted smock reaching halfway to the knees and black stock- ings, with rather large broadbrimmed felt hats of some dim and gloomy hue, each school having its own particular shade of gloom. As to skirts, they are steadily disappearing. Children wear merely a slight ruffle around the waist, young girls the aforementioned thigh-length, young women & all adults kneelength. Went to Show Boat the other night, a good London Company with Paul Dubois. It was rather surprizing to hear a Mississippi steamboat captain dropping his h's and using a cockney dialect, but that was the London idea of the language spoken in Natchez Town by the middle class, which reminds me, dear Pandora, if you want an [morning] afternoon of unalloyed delight, and have not seen Show Boat, and happen to feel up to a matinee, you would like Show Boat, I am sure. It is not only a bright, amusing, clean show, but it has a sensible libretto. I've little love for musical comedy, but I'd go to this a second time, and Old Man River is a song that will last, I'm thinking. The whole thing leaves a good taste in one's ones mouth. 3 Please excuse this mixed stationery. [TEL: ROYAL CLARENCE EXETER.] [TELEPHONE 4071.] [NIGHT PORTER.] [PRIVATE CARS FOR HIRE.] [ROYAL CLARENCE] [HOTEL,] [EXETER.] We were not greatly surprized at the result of the election, except to hear that Smith didnt carry N.Y. That really was unexpected. Also we dont know yet who was elected Governor! There is the greatest possible criticism of the British Government here for the French-English naval compromise pact. Everybody jumps on them and Lloyd George is ramping up and down the land for all he is worth. I guess Baldwin wishes it was in the bottom of the Red Sea. Then Lord Morley's just publisht Diary, dealing with the events and Cabinet discussions immediately preceding the outbreak of the war is another expose of tragic fatuity on the part of those in power. Lord Cecil in courteous but cutting phrases conveys the idea that the present government is better fitted for presiding at banquets than for guiding world affairs. The English Church is floundering in an awful mess over the Prayer Book. It would be ludicrous if it were not so seriously taken. Harold Fitch, the vicar I visited in Sheringham said it all started in an innocent blunder. The clergy thought the House of Commons wd. be the antagonistic body to change and that the Lords wd. be favorable. So they bent all their efforts to getting a strong group of speakers to introduce the new prayerbook in the Commons, and took little trouble with the introduction in the upper house. What happened was that the Commons passed the book and the Lords rejected it!! Then the Commons thought they had been too lenient, and when it came up again, there were flights of oratory and everybody got by the ears and nothing could have gone thru. And now the Bishops are by the ears, and the Archbishop of Canterbury, being 80 years old and a sensible man, has resigned to get rid of the subject. 4 TEL: ROYAL CLARENCE EXETER. TELEPHONE 4071. NIGHT PORTER. PRIVATE CARS FOR HIRE. ROYAL CLARENCE HOTEL, EXETER. They certainly do a lot of drinking here! At afternoon tea and every other meal except breakfast, the tables are covered with beverages. You dont see it in New York in the hotels, and it is not credible to suppose that beverages to anything like the same extent are consumed in hotel rooms. People arent going to rise from table and run upstairs to drink a cocktail or whiskey & soda. When the English slur Prohibition as it is in America, it usually crumples them visibly to say that while the lawless rich continue to drink bad whiskey etc in America, the working class ride to the days work in automobiles as smart or smarter than the English aristocracy use. It is perfectly self evident over here that a lot of wages goes in drink, and that it debases and handicaps the workers efficiency. A letter from Clara says you are slowly improving, and that you are trying to obey the doctors orders. That is good news. I hope you will not get tired of being good. I suppose Rosa Mawes will come soon. Have you secured a new cook yet? For goodness' sake, dont land another crab! There is a ravishing "Nocturne in Blue and Silver" by Whistler in the National Gallery here, a small painting in oils, which held me spellbound each time I have gone back to see it, -- an etherial thing of sea and sky and misty lights, mystery, expanse, loneliness beauty. --- and I thought of you all the time I looked at it, and I wondered how anybody with all that sad enchantment could have put thru the Federal Amendment!! It is beyond me how the two things could go together. And here is the place to stop. Good night, dear Pandora. TELEPHONE: REGENT 7000 (25 LINES) TELEGRAMS: "UNTIPPABLE,PICCY, LONDON." CODE: WESTERN UNION. REGENT PALACE HOTEL, PICCADILLY CIRCUS, LONDON, W.1. Nov 16, 18, 1928 Dearest Pandora, Your hand-written letter telling about Alda's sisters death, your burst into the Hollywood Circle, and your various speaking engagements, came today, and it sounds as if you were rather too strenuous. Better go a little slow, altho far be it from me to discourage the reviving spirit. Certainly it is glorious to hear that you can do such things, if you dont overdo them. There always will be a demand for you to speak, act, sing, pray, curse and bless, you know so dont think each invitation the last. You wrote before election, consequently cdnt. tell your impressions of what turned the trick. It looks as tho the country judged the two candidates on their real merits, and that more thought Hoover was better qualified than Smith. -- and it was a popular verdict, judging by the tremendous registration. Comments by the English Press are very unprejudiced, not particularly jubilant about Hoover, not disparaging to Smith. Rebecca West had a letter in the London Times this morning which made me a bit tired. Why do people never tire of giving the opinions of the little circle in which they move as representative of a whole continent's populace? She said a main reason for defeating Smith was because he would make a bad social impression on European Ambassadors in Washington!! Doubtless some people voted for Hoover on those weird grounds, but it is probably that Smith's social manners as viewed by the perfect social paragons sent over by Europe never occurred to the minds of the Ku Klux Klan, the Protestant Dry South, and the remnants of "The Ohio Gang," while as for 2 TELEPHONE: REGENT 7000 (25 LINES) TELEGRAMS: "UNTIPPABLE,PICCY,LONDON." CODE: WESTERN UNION. REGENT PALACE HOTEL, PICCADILLY CIRCUS, LONDON, W.1. Mrs. Slade, Mabel Walker Willebrandt, and last but not least, Carrie Chapman Catt, what European Ambassadors think about American table manners is not a valid or determining factor in the selection of an American President. On the whole, the impression I got from the English papers was one of suppresst disappointment that a vivid legend named "Al", had failed to get by the polls. They liked the salty, gallant convivial, human prodigy who failed to get by, and they feel a little uncomfortable in the contemplation of the "Fat Coolidge" who earned so huge a debt of gratitude from the destitute millions of little, helpless, crushed countries here and there in Europe. Even England who has a lively sense of international honor, who has the business man's instinct to be financially honest, who pays her debts when they come due in a decent way, no matter if she has to sell pictures and palaces to raise the money, even England feels a latent dislike of seeing a great philanthropist seated in the White House. What is to become of that secretly loved phrase, Uncle Shylock? Wherever Europe looks for the next four years, it will see the square face with its Baldwin-apple expression gazing back at it, and it will not be as easy to fling jibes at that stolid countenance as it was to aim at the nutmeg features of his predecessor. No, I have an impression European governments, being human, preferred Smith to Hoover for reasons of which they are justly ashamed and which they never avow. But then, I dont really know any more about European governments than Rebecca West does about the American people, -- possibly not so much. I've meant to see Mrs. Snowden but have developt a lameness in both 3 TELEPHONE: REGENT 7000 (25 LINES) TELEGRAMS: "UNTIPPABLE,PICCY,LONDON." CODE: WESTERN UNION. REGENT PALACE HOTEL, PICCADILLY CIRCUS, LONDON, W.1. feet which incommoded me a good deal. I waited till I could walk without hobbling into her presence, and as I am still hobbling, I havent seen her yet, and we are leaving for Paris tomorrow. I know she wd. have been glad to hear about you, and I am very sorry not to have seen her. Ive read "John Brown's Body" which you gave me, and was deeply impresst by it. It seemed a great book, a very fine poem in parts, and an astounding thing to have written. To have conquered you, Pandora, to the extent of making you read an Epic poem to the bitter end, at your age, is about the tallest victory I know of. I must close now, and go to an orchestral concert with the girls. More anon. Thanks a million times for letter. They are more precious than rubies. Love now and evermore M.G.P. We leave for Rome Dec 15, Address there c/o Am. Express Co.--Piazza di Spagna Wednesday Nov. 28. (Piazza) 1928 Dear Pandora: We have been here in Paris ten days now, staying at the American University Women's Club. on the left side of the Seine near the Luxembourg, 4 Rue de Chevreuse. It is frequented mostly by students doing work in the Sorbonne or at the studios, and in warm, steam heat, has an excellent table and is quiet and inexpensive, as well as very accessible to all lines of transportation. My lameness has disappeared, and I feel like a different person. I must have had rheumatism in London! We have been enjoying the town greatly. I never took much to Paris before, but this time I like it. Ive been better prepared to enjoy it, doubtless, owing to the efforts of my friends in presenting me with informing literature. I read Mme De Sevigne's Letters, and Ludwigs Napoleon and some other things last summer beside what you and others gave me. A trip out to Versailles, Malmaison, the Grande and Petit Trianons was very interesting, one beautiful sunny day. It was as amusing to see Louis XIV on every hand here, as it was to meet Mary Queen of Scots in Edinburgh, or Charles I and George IV in London. It never struck me before so overpoweringly what a consummate egoist Louis XIV was. How any man with a sense of humor could have had so many portraits and statues and allegorical representations of himself and his various performances strewn all over the palaces he lived in, -- especially when he himself neither fought the battles nor did any of the real work which he took credit for - passes me. How any he-man could have gone around wearing the curls and high heels he wore all his life to make himself look taller passes me also. Whatever you may say about Napoleon, he wore men's clothes except at his coronation, and even then, short as he was, he wore shoes without any heels, and short hair, and he had a common sense that came to the surface frequently, even after he got the emperor craze. His court costume was extremely handsome, both for women and men, without being so ornate and hampering as the costume of Louis's court. Napoleon had a healthy notion that he ought to make France contented and prosperous. Louis thought it was France's business to support the most glorious court in Europe. I have been looking at several exhibitions of court costume in various periods at the French court, and it has been most suggestive. One thing that has intrigued me is the persistence of the high heel. Why on earth have women clung to it for so many centuries, and why dont they see it is ugly and destructive of grace in gait and carriage? It has seemed to be the ambition of costumers to try to make women look as unlike human beings as possible, and women have seconded the costumers nobly in this high emprise! It tickled me a lot to read in the Paris edition of the New York Herald the other day a report of your speech to the N. Y. Federation at the Helmuth banquet. Clara Hyde wrote me about it, also, said you said a mouthful about the lipstick, with Nettie Shuler presiding in more than auroral effulgence at the head of the table! I am not in a position to say anything, having got a permanent wave! I wonder you let it pass as indulgently as you did. Well, anyway, if they do paint and hobble around on tiptoe, modern women have thrown away the corset, long skirt, and superfluous clothing, and the lipstick is less harmful than these, and less permanently disfiguring than tattooing or nose or lip-piercing. Take courage, Pandora! Thanksgiving Day - I started this letter last night. Now it is Thanksgiving morning, a grey day. Ive been looking at a list of attractive trips thru Egypt, Greece, Palestine, No. Africa, Spain, and wd. like to take every blessed one of them, but on the other hand, I am with a delightful and congenial party, and never again will have the opportunity to spend a winter in Italy with my own family, living here and doing the land thoroly and at leisure. Torn between two alluring attractions. Ive little French and less Italian and Spanish, but I scrape along. If they only wdnt. pour out such floods of conversation when you ask a simple question! You ask "Ou est le Rue Montparnasse?" and it starts a tornado!! The person interrogated strikes a dramatic posture, lifts both arms and begins. He -or she- waves them at the 4 points of the compass, clinches his fists, sprawls out a few fingers, counts them, - un, deux, trois, quatre - points fiercely at something in the distance which you peer at vaguely, wondering what it has to do with the case - and has an explosion of language. He appeals to heaven, to the waters under the earth, addresses the whole French nation, thrusts one hand into his bosom, and the other into his pocket, bows and looks at you [with] questioningly. You wave your arms in return, thank him and start whither you thought he directed you. He darts before you, spreds his arms blocking the way, does his stuff all over again, takes you by the elbow, gesticulating wildly with his disengaged hand, sets your feet upon the right path, counts his fingers again, gives a farewell oration, and runs away before you go wrong again. Then you take out your map and dig it out for yourself as you ought to do in every emergency. It saves time. We are to have a big dinner here at the club this noon. about 175 plates, all Americans. We have a guest or two ourselves, and will go out to a matinee or movie afterwards. There are lots of lectures on history, art, literature, archaeology going on in English at all the galleries and various studios for wh. one can sign up. One very popular lecturer is Florence Haywood, a child of nature who took her BA at Leland Stanford. She has a twang that carries above any amount of noise and confusion. We went to one of her Louvre lectures, bought our ticket at the gate, hired our camp stools, and followed her around, camping before each picture she discusst. There were 60 of us. It was on Monday, and only people attending lectures were allowed in the Louvre. It was fun, but as the subject of the lecture was David, Napoleon's pet painter, the pictures were rather dark and dismal. Miss Haywood spent half the time descanting on the attractions of her other lectures and trips to outlying chateaux etc. Result, we all with one accord signed up for a trip to Chantilly tomorrow morning! Hope it doesnt rain as it did the day we went with Dr. Allen's crowd to St. Denis. There is a depressing spot! I've rarely been to a gloomier one. It was so dark you cdnt. see your hand before your face inside the church, and there were tombs on every hand from the tomb of Clovis down. What made it worse, we were told the remains of all these monarchs and their families had been dug up and pitched into a ditch in the Reign of Terror, and later had been re-interred in a common grave in the crypt. Now it detracts from a tomb to know it sets on a floor with nobody under it. I felt distinctly cheated of my rights. The only authentic, untroubled tombs there are those of Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette and the few kings since their time, who were buried in the crypt after the Revolution. Napoleon planned to be buried there, but as Dr. Allen said, "circumstances prevented." Well, dearest Pandora, I hope you are having a nice Thanksgiving day, with friends around you, and diversions aplenty. I do hope you will come to Berlin. If you do I shall stay over & come home with you - or at any rate till you come home. With very best love, ever yours, Mary Remember me with love to Alda, and Henrietta, & Clara. Paris. Dec 5, 1928 Dearest Pandora: - Pride has had a fall. I've got an insufferable bronchial cold, but am now happily convalescent having staid indoors practically five days. Happily the weather has been dark, so that little cd. be seen indoors had I been vigorous enough to go after things, and I dont feel Ive lost much. Cora's sister, Jessie Chapman, bought a magazine called "transition" (small t), publisht by the American artistic young bloods living over here, and left it with me to read. She wishes to send it away to a nephew who is in the diplomatic service in Brussels, if it is all right. I've looked it over, and if it is a faithful reflection of the present generation, I'm thankful I dont belong to it. It is very similar to a larger volume publisht in America last year, containing a collection of what were alleged to be the choicest efforts of the rising lights in [literature] literature in America during the year just ended. As the two books are considerably alike, I presume they do reflect the tendencies of the present day, and these tendencies seem to me mainly feeble- minded. As in the American volume, this magazine gives star place in its pages to a lady whose portrait it publishes alongside her article. Her name is Gertrude Stein. The portrait shows a middle aged woman, close-cropt fine masculine head, shapeless mannish clothes, flat-footed sandles on her feet, sitting in a chair outdoors. You rather like her looks. You turn hopefully to her article, and here is the first sentence copied word for word. "A kind in glass and a cousin, a spectacle and nothing strange a single hurt color and an arrangement in a system to pointing." This is the opening sentence in a description of "a carafe, that is a blind glass." It is the first sentence in an outpouring called "Tender Buttons" published 14 years ago, which seems to have made her famous. What it means only the elect know. A footnote quotes her as saying of "Tender Buttons."- "It was my first conscious [effort] struggle with the problem of corellating light, sound, and sense, and eliminating rhythm. Some of the solutions in it still seem to me alright, now I am trying grammar, and eliminating sight and sound," I feel very humble in the presence of psychological researchers, as I have no gift or taste that way. I like rhythm and if this is what happens when it is eliminated, I say let the cosmic Dance of Siva go on ad infinitum! Later in the volume, Gertrude answers some questions in a questionnaire sent out to all these Parisian genii who have left America to live here. Not to know them doubtless argues myself unknown, but I certainly never heard of one of them except Gertrude, and all I knew about her was that she had a great long story publisht in that American Anthology I spoke of, and that I cdnt. understand a blessed word of it. I thought she was trying to write a sustained story that was pure nonsense. But you see how wrong we are in judging these new bloods! She is a psychologist, and has succeeded in doing what they have all been trying to do for a long time and cdnt. accomplish, -- that is evolve a completely meaningless [to other folks] language in which to express their thoughts to one another. I'll say they have gone the Tower of Babel one better. My sister came home from the Autumn Salon, yesterday, filled with indignation and describing the pictures in good old perfectly intelligible cuss-words. Well, each generation to its taste. Only 2 the condescending, or often hostile allusions to America, [as tho it were a place inhabited by fools, hypocrites, slaves and slave-bosses exclusively, with no art, no letters, no manners, no morals, nothing but wicked prosperity which is the mother of fatheadedness] -- on the part of these precious exiles from their native land make one tired. They are in the right place alright, and I hope they stay here. I could speak more emphatically, but you get what I mean! The real reason they stay is because its cheap, and they can get all kinds of liquor, and there is an establisht menagerie in the Latin Quarter where they are at home. Also its easier to run down America when you cant see its greatness on every hand. When Im home, on the contrary, I feel like Jeremiah, and it is only when I am in Europe that I feel like taking up the cudgels in defense of the so-called Land of the Free. Dear Pandora, I wonder daily how you are. You seem to have been doing an awful lot of speaking and going to N.Y. For heaven's sake dont take cold. This twist of mine has been a lesson. How does the diet come on? What kind of a cook have you secured? How is Alda Wilson? What is she reading to you? Do you get out in the car daily? When does Rosa Mawes arrive? If she is there, give her my love and ask her to please write me. I wonder whether you are going to make Berlin? If you are, I want to stay for the Congress, altho' I wouldnt probably be in the delegation. Maybe you'd speak to me even if I werent, and I shouldnt wonder if Rosa would cook up some kind of a Red Cross or Legion of Honor badge that wd. get me into the hall for the meetings. I would act as a stretcher bearer if all else failed. Never shall I forget Stockholm, - that white city with the blue lake water rushing thru, the dark pines and flaming sky where you spoke at the evening outdoor meeting, the excursions on the water, the long midsummer nights when the sun hardly set, the longing, the heartbreak, the passionate adoration, the grief at parting, the lonely journey home when all I most craved was going steadily away from me eastward. Pandora, there are two sides to being in love. It isnt all it is cracked up to be, and why dont we try to cure ourselves? You ought to know and I ask you. Life cures most of us, but some of us are incurable and yet manage to scrape along to a pretty ripe age. Now dont go passing this letter around! I dont feel exactly easy in my mind about sending it, knowing how perfectly careless you are about loveletters. If I ever got any, Id treasure them like the Codex Argentius we saw at Upsala University, the most costly book, or anyhow the most treasured, in the western world. I cease at this point. My very very best love to you, dear chief and friend. Mary Gray Peck P.S. Dont forget that hereafter letters are to be addressed to Rome c/o American Express Co. - 38-40 Piazza di Spagna. Pension Girardet, 12 Piazza dell'Esquilino Rome, Italy. Dec. 19. 1928 Mia carissima Pandora:- We have been in Rome a week now, a week of memorable impressions to all of us. Cora and her sister, Mrs. Chapman, have been here before, the latter many times. I'm glad its my first visit. It hits me in the solar plexus every time I leave the house. My niece and I are taking Italian lessons. I can ask my way quite comfortably now, but cant understand the directions I get in answer. Sunday the girls (Emily Halick & Mary Gray, my niece) and I wanted to go in one of those open one-horse vehicles around the Borghese Gardens, and Jessie Chapman told Mary what to [ask] say to the driver. We went down to the Piazza, hailed a carriage & Mary told him we wanted to go to the Giordan[o]i Boghesi. He looked bewildered, said considerable wh. we didnt understand, and we had to go back to our pension, get a dictionary and look up gardens. It was Giardini, [and] but anybody with any sense ought to have known when we said we wanted to take a giro around the Giordani Boghese, that we wanted to ride in the Boghese Gardens, but that driver was hopelessly stumped. This shows that some Italians are dumb. Generally, however, they are smart as whips, and will leave their business to set you on your way. I told our party it seems like getting back home to be among Italians again, - there are so many in Ontario County! The Italians are a good-looking race, with frank, open faces, a ready smile, and even here in Rome where they are called grave and self-contained compared with other sections of Italy, there is a continual chorus of song on the street, and the maids sing at their work here in the Pension. Nice maids they are, quite self-respecting and self-unconscious. I must tell you about the Girardet family who keep the Pension. There are Signor and Signora Girardet, - he a white-bearded little gentleman who looks like a good-humored Poincare, she a broad and affable dame who presides over our destinies with dignity and efficiency. Signor Girardet has a sister, white-haired and very pretty, Signora Girardet has two sisters, Sister Luisa a very vivid, positive, masterful lady, and Sister Eugenia a quiet, very courteous, slow-spoken person. They are all Waldensians, and are the very salt of the earth. The Pension has about 50 guests, many of them "repeaters", old timers who come and live here again and again. There is an artist and his family, several professors and their wives on Sabbatical Year, many women from Womens colleges studying in the American School here. They are all middle-aged or elderly. We are housed in a 5 story building with an automatic elevator that will carry 4 persons and no more. After Xmas I am to have a room on the 4th floor facing south on the Piazza di Spagna, which is a fine square with the beautiful flight of steps leading up to the historic Santa Maria Maggiore on one side, an obelisk in the middle of the Piazza, and a continual procession of highly decorated donkeys and horses drawing two wheeled carts, the seats of which look like baby carriages turned sidewise, upholstered inside & painted like stage-scenery, peasant women with bundles on their heads, every known variety of priest, monk, and friar, and most frequent of all, soldiers in many varieties of uniforms, generally topt off with a cape, long, full, and worn with one corner thrown over the left shoulder by the officers, shorter for the common soldiers. They have the smartest uniforms we have seen on the continent. They wear them with an air, but do not swagger as the Prussian army did. We wonder how Italy manages to support so many men who are not producing anything? With the church and the army out of action, the remainder of the nation carries a 2 pretty stiff handicap. I see Kitti says there are 200,000 fascisti employed in semi-police duty - guards or inspectors on trains, in stations, on road-duty, etc etc. We saw them sitting at the end of each coach on our train coming to Rome! Besides them, there is the regular army, the militia, the recruits, and down at the bottom the Fascist Boy Scouts. Sunday morning these last were marched up thru the Piazza to the peculiar beat of their drums, platoon after platoon of them in black shirts, white cord & tassels, olive drab knickers, white gloves, black caps with tassels in front. I guess they went to church, for an hour later they all came marching back. Well, the nation is being militarized, but when one looks at the majestic ruins that encircle modern Rome, one wonders at the courage of a government that can start again on that imperial road. Italy has small chance of repeating that history, and already at the beginning of the new cycle, her birth rate is falling, -- the fatal sign that marked the beginning of ancient Rome's decline. Mussolini has referred repeatedly to this symptom, and urged the nation to brace up and multiply as of yore. But this is a matter beyond any government to help or hinder. There is a deep-seated, mysterious instinct that governs reproduction, and it hasnt much connection with human will or desire. If the instinct is for life, children are born; if it decrees death, we become sterile. The ancients felt this mystery as keenly as we do, and put fate or The Fates behind and above the Gods. Perhaps Nature, seeing the folly of breeding a race bent on destroying itself, has decided to shut off the supply. It may be life will become so precious no government will dare throw it away. There are very interesting excavations going on at Ostia, Herculaneum, and the famous project of draining Lake Nemi to get at the houseboats of two Roman Emperors which sank there. We are hoping to visit all three sites, and it may be that March will see the boats bared and we may see them. The Baths of Caracalla, Baths of Diocletian, and the Colosseum are stupendous enough to indicate what Rome must have been in the days of her glory, but when one sees the same indications in Britain, Africa, and Asia, it staggers the imagination. How could the empire hang together in days of slow communication? Tomorrow morning at 7.[5]45 the Pope celebrates Mass in St. Peters. I have known the time time when I would have risen with the birds to go, but not now. Havent energy enough to get tickets & start out. We may get an audience. I should like very much to see the ceremony and the Pope himself, and the kind of folks who go to that kind of thing. The Catholic Church is a wonderful organization, as wonderful as the Roman Empire was, – and as archaic. I hear of the speeches you have been making. I wish I were to be at the Cause & Cure. Do Please try not to take cold. Give my love to Rosa Manus and tell her it would be a good deed for her to write to me. With my very best love to you, dear Pandora, and greetings to Alda and Mabel Russell. Ever your most devoted, Mary P.S. This was started as a birthday letter, but I got so excited over the Toga that I never got to wish you a Happy Birthday One wd. think your 70th came round every 5 minutes by the way I mention it!! Pandora, its the most precious anniversary the women of America have to celebrate. What it is to me personally, you well know. I hope you live longer than I do, and I shall live years yet!! 12 Piazzo Esquilino, Rome Dec. 29. 1928 Dear Pandora:– We are getting disquieting reports on influenza epidemic in the States. I do hope you wont get it. I dread for you the days in Washington at the Conference! I always got a cold there, and if I remember aright, you have generally caught one, too! Why dont you get innoculated before you go? I've got a bad cold this minute, and lay it to getting overtired and overheated at the various religious ceremonies we attended at all hours of day and night during the past week. Being here in the very nest of ceremony, as it were, we put in a hard week at the chief centers of attraction. For instance we went to Vespers at St. Peters, Friday; mass, Sunday at St. P.; midnight mass at Santa Maria Maggiore which is just across the street, and where they have a procession at midnight to bring the Bambino from a chapel to the High Altar on Xmas Eve; and ended up Xmas Day by going to St. Peters again and hearing one whole mass and parts of two others! Then I was wiped out by this infernal cold, but Im better. I suppose you think I ought to have considerably more than a simple cold after all that, and that anybody who has such infantile tastes is beneath contempt. But even quite intelligent people lie a good show, Pandora, and you certainly get the finest show on earth at St. Peters when the Pope and the Cardinals gird up their loins for a high festival. The music is beyond description. I've hear all my life about those male sopranos in the Vatican choir, and at last I've heard 'em. At Santa Maria Maggiore, I stood within 10 feet of one of them, when a group of singers stood there to sing the Gloria in Excelsis as the procession were bringing the Bambino along under a canopy with great pomp, censers swinging, candles, crosses, and what not. The monks who had been chanting steadily for 2 hours were hoarse and worn out, and they had vile voices to begin with. By this time the noise the made was unbearable. Suddenly this group of picked singers appeared out of nowhere, and lifted up their voices without any instrument. A heavenly strain of harmony soared upward, rolled down the nave, filled the air, – full-throated, intricate, voice after voice taking up the theme, until they were all winding in and out like the angels ascending and descending in Jacobs dream. One of these was a soprano, and he looked indeed like an angel, but a fallen one, – a strange, intense creature, and with a glorious voice. As to the Bambino, it was a large gilt cupid, reclining on top of a covered vehicle that looked like a gilt and porcelain soup toureen! and it had one pudgy arm extended in a permanent wave at the audience. We saw a finer show next day at St. Peters when Merry del Val celebrated High Mass out in the main body of the church. A cardinal in all his glory is the most gorgeous being this dull earth has to offer, I guess. We stood and sat at a distance, on the step of the railing around the High Altar under the dome, which enabled us to look over the heads of the crowd, and Merry's cerise cap moving back and forth against the gold background of the altar as he did a very thoro job of fumigating everything and everybody in sight, was as vivid as a pigeon-blood ruby in a gold ring. We could see it still when we turned away and were 2 going out the entrance, and paused for a last look. There was that drop of red moving, way at the other end of the church! A couple of days later, we went to the Palatine, and roamed around the whole morning. That was the most interesting morning I have spent in Rome. I had supposed that the Baths of Diocletian and Caligula had been the high spots of Rome in the way of ruins, but the Palatine surpassed them. They are excavating all the time, and they have a beautiful exhibit of three palaces built on atop of the other, the lowest the Palace of Augustus, 20 feet below the surface. On top of that, Nero built. Then Vespasian and Titus & Domitian built on top of Nero's structure. The extent and luxury of the imperial dwellings were incredible to my unsophisticated eyes. Versailles seemed pretty magnificent, and the Louvre quite large enough. But Louis XIV was not in the same class with the Roman Emperors. There was the Colosseum, the triumphal arches, the Baths, the ruins of the Basilica Constantino, Basilica Julia, Basilica Aemilia to prove it. Louis and his court would have looked puny on the Palatine or in the Colosseum beside the free-stepping togaed Roman, with his close cropt head and shaven face. Wigs and high heels have no natural dignity. Toga and sandals have. – Here I had a very apropos talk with a Miss Wilson who is writing a second book on Roman Costume. Her first book was an expansion of her thesis on the Toga, by which she got her doctors degree at John's Hopkins. She ran the toga down to its origin and final exit from the stage of history, the latter being when, as somebody said, – "The last Roman toga was worn to the grave when the last Roman Consul was buried." She is now writing a book on Roman costume in its entirety, women's, childrens, artizans, slaves, – the colors, materials, where and how woven and dyed. It was intensely interesting to hear her discuss her subject. She said the article in the Encyclopedia Brit. on the toga is all wrong. She has visited every collection of Roman antiquities in Europe, has gone thru all Roman literature and culled out references to costume. She experimented with various materials, draping models and comparing them with photographs of portrait statues until she could reproduce the effect exactly. The old Roman clung to his Toga, put it on in the morning and wore it all day. In cold weather it was of wool, in hot weather of thin stuff. He would no more go outdoors without it than we wd. go out without a dress. "He considered it indecent to show his legs." Those were her words! She said it was strange that he was so prudish when he saw bare legs around him all the time, – slaves, workmen, artizans, soldiers. In extreme weather, he wore a cloak over the toga called a Paenula, and this hooded cloak is the garment from which the military cape so affected by the Italian army is descended. She says it is uncanny to see the ancient Roman evolving his toga, a garment so perfectly expressive of the grave dignity and authority of the ideal national character, to see how the toga lasted as long as the empire lasted, and died with its overthrow. Miss Wilson was born in Iowa. I asked if she had a relative named Alda, and she said she had no relations in the state, that her family moved there recently and had left the state now. She is a quiet, middle aged, unaffected, good looking woman, wears glasses, dresses well, is acquainted with all the archaeologists and everybody at the American Academy. She lives here at the Pension Girardet. There are several American Professors on Sabatical, here with their wives. One of my old Minnesota students, Irene McKeehan by name, 3 now Prof. of English in the University of Colorado, turned up here all unbeknownest, to stay awhile, the other day. The Girardets gave a grand tea party, Xmas Day, with a tree and a gift for everybody in the house. We had all chipt in and given each of them a nice gift [apiece]. Then we had a full dress dinner in the evening. This on top of our church going in the morning made it a strenuous day. We have continental breakfast anytime before 9.30, luncheon at 1 P.M., go out for tea, dine at 7.30. I dont like the meal schedule, don't like late dinner, but have to do in Rome as the Romans do. Im starved before every meal. I like Italian food very much. The weather here has been very sunny and fine. Mary Gray and I walked down to the Forum, round the end, back to the other end where the Arch of Titus stands, and from there to the Colosseum, the night after Xmas. There was a full moon. When we go to the Colosseum, I had a qualm about going out of the light into the shadow of those tremendous arches and corridors. It was still as the grave. But I wasnt going to quail before my niece, and in we went. I reflected that if we fell among thieves, I had left my money at home. We walked thru toward the arena. Presently I saw a dark figure flit across the arch opening on the arena. "There is the thief waiting for us!" I thought, and went boldly toward him. We saw other figures beyond him, silent as ghosts, drifting like the shades described by Dante "thru the dark air". When we emerged into the moonlit arena, we found it full of Americans, archeologists and professors taking a moonlight stroll to settle their dinner, tourists seeking romance. Guides were using flash lights to show inscriptions etc. Indeed the Colosseum was the most frequented spot in Rome, and if you want to be secure at night, there is the place to go! It is time for me to turn in. We are going to hear the opera "Norma" tomorrow. It begins at 5.30 P.M. a weird hour. We won't have dinner till nine o'clock after it, and I shall take a lunch to eat between acts. I simply cant live without dinner till nine P.M. The opera is set in England in Druid times. I am anticipating eagerly the sight of a band of Italian Druids! It ought to be a memorable spectacle. Give my love to Alda Wilson and to Rosa Manus. I wish I could have been where I could see you during these holidays. I have thought very often about you. Clara Hyde has written of your increasing activities; I rejoice to hear of them. Keep a little careful and dont expend your strength faster than it accumulates. You are the most wonderful creature in the world, but you are mortal. I would give almost anything to be with you. I shall be so emaciated with hunger for you by the time I see you again that you will think I'm a skeleton from the catacombs. My bones will rattle in my skin as I approach. Good night, transcendant being. You might write a line or two. Ever yours– MGP Pension Girardet 12 Piazza dell' Esquilino, Rome January 21, 1929 Dearest Pandora:– I have just finished reading Clara's account of the Birthday celebration, and it certainly was a noble function. Judging from Clara's outline, it was about as nice as it could well have been. I confess my heart was sore within me to think I was not there. You dont mean any more to anybody than you do to me, and it is a cruel fate that kept me absent on this memorable day. But wait till you're eighty, or wait till you celebrate your suffrage Jubilee! I intend to be the belle of that ball or bust. Meantime Clara's letter drew a drop of blood from my heart and a bitter tear from my eye. Rosa Manus certainly made the entire course in one hit with that basket of seeds! That is the gem of the occasion to my mind, and the planting of the tree was nearly as good. I would give 1000 lire this minute to see the film of you. Perhaps they will show it in Berlin next summer. Which brings me to the next point. Have you made any plans for the I.W.S.A. Congress? If so, it would please me a lot to know what they are. I suppose you wont stay over here long, and that you wont want me underfoot anyhow. but if I can manage to squeeze into the press which will will surround you, Id like to. You might rise up some morning after the Cause & Cure and send me a (dictated) line, if your tongue is able to wag. Im going to Munich the last of July to stay till Aug 15, and for once hear all the Wagner opera I want to. I may go to Salzburg to hear Mozart Opera, before that. What I chiefly want to know now is when you plan to arrive, what your itinerary will be, when you plan to go back to America. My party leave me early in May. From then to the time of the Congress I am a wandering sheep amidst the fleecers. I've come across an old Minnesota student. Irene McKeehan, now Prof. of English in the Univ. of Col. We both happened to come to this Pension, which is full of American scholars, old, young and indifferent, studying during their Sabbatical years. She and I are going to this Munich thing, and Cora's sister, Mrs. Chapman is rejoining me after her trip with some other friends in June, for the same end – opera. But between the Congress and the Munich opera season Im a free lance, also for about a month before the Berlin meeting. Rome is the most impressive city I ever was in. It casts a spell over me. I dont see the city as it is. I see it in a glorious haze of history. Not that the history was glorious. It was not, in many ways. But Rome did a lot for the world, nevertheless, that no other power ever did. One cant help it. Wherever you go, some crag of masonry thrusts itself up out of the ground and you stop to study your guidebook to see what Augustus or Vespasian or Trajan or Hadrian once built there? I cant understand my reaction to the Catholic Church! I certainly think it is the most idiotic organization on the mental side that the western world ever evolved, and yet I go around with great pleasure and watch the Blessing of the Horses, Dogs, Birds, and even automobiles! Today we went to see two lambs blest – the two whose fleeces are to provide wool for something – not a combination suit – wh. the Pope will wear during the coming year. I believe he is to eat the lambs Easter Day. Well, we went to the wrong church with the same name, St. Agnes, 2 and saw two cardinals instead of the two lambs! It was a clear case of Providence. I've seen many lambs in my time, but a close up view of cardinals on dress parade is a novelty. One was old Vanutelli, 92 years old, tall and thin and white as a taper on the altar. He sat on a throne, and didn't do much except look like a cardinal. The other was a man around 55, hawk faced, blue-eyed, who celebrated that part of the mass where the wine is drunk. He let half a dozen other priests get all the preparatory work done, and then he came along and did the drinking. He too was a cardinal, but not as gorgeous as Old Vanutelli. He sat on a gold chair down in front of the altar as immovable as a statue most of the time, with more red and gold garments on than a man of his size should have assumed. He looked like a Roman Senator more than like a follower of Jesus Christ. His red jewelled gloves were most astounding. He kept his hands palms down on his knees and as I was close to the railing I saw them well. He kept his eyes on the floor and tried to look pious, but it wasnt successful. Both he and Vannutelli wore their longest trains and had priests to carry them. He went out at the close of the mass with all his clothes on. But they pretty much undressed Old Vannutelli right up there on his throne before they let him out. They took off four different layers, and then he had on the garment with the long train. They stopt when they got to that. As fast as they took off a robe they passed it along a line of priests till it got to the altar and there they spread it out to dry, I suppose. When they got thru with him, the altar looked like a dry-cleaning establishment on the edge of the Red Light District. It has been cold in Rome the past few days, a little snow, not enough to mention, but they make a great fuss over it. My room is a very nice one, facing south on the Piazza dell' Esquilino, and to sun pours in all day nearly. It is uncomfortably warm around noon. I dont spend much time in it as my niece is dreadfully energetic and somebody has to keep up with her. There will be little left in Rome that I have not seen by the time we leave! We go to Sicily around Feb. 16. for a couple of weeks, then to Naples, where we will try to see the new excavations at Herculaneum. From Naples we expect to come by auto northward as the weather invites stopping where the prospect invites us to linger. This pension is a very unusual place. The guests are interesting, but the prime attraction is the Waldensian family who runs it. They are 1. Signor Girardet, 2. his wife, 3. his sister, 4-5 his wife's two sisters. They are very intelligent, well educated, the Signor and his sister, artists. The two sisters of his wife are most lovable, and entirely delightful. They have put our party up near the end where they are, and Mary Gray and I sweat blood trying to talk Italian at the table at meal times. They are extremely patient and painstaking with us. I may have told you we take Italian lessons three times a week. I noticed yesterday things hanging under all the wine carts that passed me, they looked like rams-horns, – and that is just what they are! Every horse drawn vehicle has one. They ward off the evil eye!! The Roman people and their church are about as pagan as they were when Constantine changed the official church. When it warms up, we are going to Ostia, and Ill tell you what the Govt of Ancient Rome looked like in 200 A.D.– I bought 4 oranges for about 4 cts Am. money yesterday! Good bye, darling Pandora! Remember me affectionately to Rosa M. and Alda W. With my very best to yourself– Mary. Rome, Tues. Jan 29. 192[8][*9*] c/o Am. Express, 40 Piaz. di Spagna Dearest Pandora: Its been a long while for me to go without writing to you. Several times I have been all set, and something interrupted me. I ought to be studying Italian irregular verbs at this very moment, but will not heed the call of duty. As you may have read in the papers Italy has had a fit over a few snow flakes. It was pitiful to see the children down in the Piazza scraping them off the steps of Santa Maria Maggiore and treasuring the dripping slush till they had a ball as big as a peanut, and then aiming it carefully as so precious a projectile deserved at the most important personage in sight. So far as Rome goes the snowfall was nil. I have an idea it wouldnt have made a New Englander faint away to see what fell anywhere else in Italy. They say the trams were stopt in Naples, but if they are like the trains in Rome, the Act of God was fully justified! Also very few flakes wd. have sufficed. Come to think, I believe it was hail that stopt the trams in Naples, and from my observation it would appear that one ordinary hailstone the size of a pea would have disrupted service until the obstacle was dislodged. Not that I despize the Roman trams. They have to be small and narrow in order to get around corners and go thru the narrowest streets. They have a row of narrow double seats on one side, and a row of single seats on the other side and a narrow aisle in which two people can barely squeeze past each other, and the conductor walks back & forth demanding fares of people who are packed standing in the aisle Everybody has to go out the front door and believe me it is like going over the top to plow your way thru to the door. Still, we who have the N.Y. Subway can scarcely criticise anything else in the way of transportation. Ive done a lot of sightseeing. There is no end more to be done. Naturally the historic part of Rome appeals to me most, but Im beginning to feel an urge to know the modern people. Apparently there is the utmost loyalty and confidence toward the present government. I have no means of knowing about anything else. Everybody points with pride to the rehabilitation of the country after the Fascisti took over control. The family who run this pension are very fine people, Waldensians, very devout and superior to the average in culture and intelligence, and they swear by Mussolini. I have a feeling that they feel that the present government is the only power able to handle the Roman Catholic church, and there is a long history of oppression and persecution to account for the dread and hostility of the Waldensian church to the Catholic. Then too, business and professional people will support any regime that gives security to property. The scare they had after the close of the war when strikes and disorder threatened the whole social organization made a dictator not only tolerable but welcome, and the present government appears to be doing its best to inculcate an obedient, docile habit of mind such as Prussia developt in the Teutonic character in the last generation. It seems strange to read the papers day after day and see nothing but peace on earth, good will to the government, after our ravens yells of scorn and derision at whoever may be for the moment in power in America. There is something sinister in this harmony. Sunday morning I watched what was going on down in the piazza from my window. Drums were beating all the morning. Companies of soldiers were marched to church, a small band w. skis started for the Alban Hills which were white with snow. Endless companies of adolescent boys in Fascist uniforms were drilling and then starting apparently for church. Last of all, a company of boys 8-10 yrs old 2 came along with a man in charge, a little boy leading off with the air and stride of a commanding general, the rest following as proudly as the Old Guard followed Napoleon. The black tassels on their caps swing in unison and their bare knees, purple with cold, worked like machinery as they kept time to the drums of the adult bands. Now since the days of Ancient Rome, Italy has seen nothing like this. The Italian people for many a century have been individualistic, independant. They have been split up into sections and factions. Like the Greeks they lost out politically by their individualism, but also like the Greeks they created a glorious art. Garibaldi and his group for a moment welded the diverse peoples into one, but after the political unification, the sections again gradually seem to have fallen apart until the war violently put the nation into a strait jacket. After the war the naturally repellant elements recoiled from one another till Mussolini like another Peter the Hermit caught their imagination with a crusade, and they followed him to Rome and captured the government. Mussolini has been wise enough to appeal to two very deep-rooted instincts – the desire to grab and the instinct to deny self for the sake of a high purpose, – to grab and to devote, the selfish and the religious. He has to deal with the Roman church, too, which holds precedence in the national imagination. Nobody can go to a church ceremonial and watch the crowd without being stupefied at the sight of a heterogenious collection of all grades of intelligence finding each something it needs in the spectacle. I never cease to marvel at the craving of humanity for symbolism. The savage has his fetish and we have the church. I suppose nothing is nearer Mussolini's heart than the identification in the Italian mind of the Catholic church with the Fascist authority. At present there is a disturbing dualism, a division if not an antagonism between two kinds of religious fervor. He wd. like to appropriate the church and direct its authority to the working out of his political and social program, which is strictly national in scope. But the church, which once was temporal lord of Italy and couldnt make a go of it has had enough of that kind of working agreement. Certainly the Pope wd. never consider taking a position subordinate to the Italian government. The Vatican is the only international organization in a social sense with real authority and structural unity. When it lost temporal power it learned something. The Vatican is not like the Bourbons. I believe it has definitely turned its back on political affiliations, and if it were not so soaked in superstition it might show the League of Nations a whole bag of tricks. Well, enough of this. I didn't start out on this tack and I crave pardon. What started me off was an archaeological lecture I went to yesterday wherein, Dr. McIvor, the authority on prehistoric Italian races, gave an exposition of the racial background of the Italian nation of today. Very interesting. He showed a map, and on it was a line drawn across Italy from Naples northeast to the Adriatic. On one side of the line the ancient people buried their dead, on the other they burned them. On one side the culture came up from Spain and down from Hungary, on the other side it was African in origin by way of Sicily. And to this day said Dr. McIvor there is a cleavage between north and south Italy, in temperament and character. I dont know how true this is, but I do know that the Italians from Abruzzi whom I know in Ontario County have a deep disrespect for Neapolitans and Sicilians, & Jimmie Tollis wont hire the latter if he can help it. 3 Well, now, if Africa and Europe are still struggling against each other in the blood of modern Italy, can that primordial feud ever be staunched? Or is it because we keep raking up old feuds and talking about them that they survive? Later – This afternoon, my niece, my old student Irene McKeehan, and I went up on Monte Mario for the view. It is west of Rome, and overlooks the city and all the Campagna to the sea, while the Alban Hills and Sabine Mts stretching north east to the Appenines outlined the Campagna on the east. The afternoon was warm and sunny, like spring. We went by train most of the way and walked the rest of the way across the grassy slope of the height. The city was spred out beneath us, St. Peters and the mass of the Vatican with its great park surrounding it being most impressive. The Borghese Gardens on the north side of the city looked like a forest, churches rose out of the level of houses all over the city, St. John Lateran's statues on the roof being especially prominent. We could see the fine campanile of our own Santa Maria Maggiore towering over every other in the city, and the grim medieval fortresses of the Conti, the [Miligia] Milizie, and others stood out like skyscrapers. In many of them, the poorer laboring classes are housed. They have to walk up and down seven or eight flights of stairs and their washing is always hanging out of the windows. Seeing these bare, square, massive piles gives one a vivid idea of what life in Rome must have been when they were full of brutal soldiery attached to lawless nobles, who in turn were attached to Pope or Emperor, and the Pope barricaded himself from friends and enemies alike in the Castle of St. Angelo and excommunicated both, right and left. No dull days then. They didn't need movies. The mountains were covered with snow which was a soft pink in the sunshine. We could see thru our glasses ruins on every height and topmost peak. In ancient times, magnificent villas were spred out all over the mountains. Some of the Emperors were fond of building where they could look down on all sides upon the prospect. Hadrian especially having a choice assortment of villas on mountain peaks. It must have been hard to get up and down, but they were used to horseback riding and litters. Did I tell you the Flavian palace on the Palatine had an elevator to let the Emperor down to the Circus at his private entrance? We havent many luxuries the Caesars didnt have. I must not fail to record that on Monte Mario little daises with pink-tipt petals were blooming thick. We are going to Sicily Feb 12 to be gone a month there and in Naples, Sorrento etc. Then we return to Rome, take some trips out from the city for a couple of weeks, then take an auto and drive to Florence by way of some of the Hill Towns,– Perugia etc. My address until the first of April will be c/o American Express Co. Rome, after that c/o Am. Express Paris till May 1st. I am still hoping to see you over here in Berlin. I think of you a great deal, wondering how you are. I dread the strain of the Cause & Cure conference for you. It is over by this time, and I wonder if you came away from Washington with a cold? For once I was thoroughly delighted with our State Dept. and Mr. Hughes when I read the Foreign Policy Bulletin outline of the Arbitration Treaty drawn up at the Washington Pan Am Arbitration Conference which closed Jan 5. But I wonder what the Senate will do with it? I bet they tack on the Monroe Doctrine like a tin can on the dogs tail! I must go to bed, dear Pandora. Its late and Im tired. I wish you would miss me a little! Ever yours– Mary Rome, Feb 10, 1929 Dearest Pandora:– A letter from E. Hauser to H.T.U. was forwarded by the latter to Fanny Horton, H.T.U.'s cousin who is now in Rome, and again was forwarded by F. Horton to me. Elizabeth wrote from Washington where she had just seen you ill in your bed. It was less alarming than the letter I received from Clara 5 days ago, but none the less disquieting, since Clara's letter was written two days later than Elizabeths. Ive sent Clara some money with minute instructions as to my whereabouts and an ultimatum about cabling me frequently. I hope, too, that you will be good enough to send me a cable as soon as you know whether or not you contemplate coming to Berlin. You may not be able to decide, of course, until later. I am going to Sicily tomorrow for two weeks, 4 days Taormina, 2 days to 3 days Syracuse, 2 days Girgenti, 4 days Palermo. Thence to Sorrento, Hotel Cocumella 5 days // Naples c/o Am. Express Co code "Amexco". 9 days, ending March 10. // Then Rome, Pension Girardet, Piazza Esquilino, till March 17 // From March 18 to April 1, c/o Am. Exp. Co. Florence.// Apr. 1-25 c/o Am. University Womens Club, Paris.// There, thats as far ahead as I can tell just now. If I keep getting bad reports about you, I'm coming back home. Not that I think you will be raised up to health and strength by my return, nor yet that you will be overjoyed at the prospect of my return. People with shingles usually have less affection for their fellow men than they have when they are less occupied with their own misery. The anxiety I feel about you is indescribable and I want to be near you. I might either go to a hotel in New Rochelle or take an apartment for the summer, subletting from some teacher who went away for the vacation. I tell you this so that you may know what my idea is. Meantime I could look around for an apartment for the winter. Elizabeth's letter had one sentence that took my breath away. It was to the effect that there was talk in Washington about an estrangement between the Coolidges, with a rumor that Calvin would divorce his wife! There was no comment or explanation simply the statement. All I can say is I shd. think she wd. jump at the chance!! It is too bad, however, for people in their position not to be able to suppress their inclinations and put up a good front till they are out of the lime-light. Day before yesterday we went to see the Russian Government film showing the rescue of the Nobile expedition in the Arctic last summer. The news reel showed Coolidge in some tropical jungle with a shot gun and some natives. He shot at something and the natives rushed off the scene to pick up the alleged kill. While Calvin turned with elaborate unconcern, removed his panama hat so the photographer cd. get a good view, and walked away, lifting his feet very high like a hen in the snow! It was a killing picture. The Arctic film was very fine. This is the second Soviet film I have seen, the other being "The End of St. Petersburg", which was a wonderful picture. Certainly, the touching hands of Russia and Italy in this rescue is a striking episode. There wasnt a single handclap in the audience till Amundsen's picture was shown, and after that not till the conclusion, when there was a pretty good applause. The film didnt make much of Nobile, and apparently the audience didnt either. Anyhow they didnt applaud his appearance. Now I must close and pack for Sicily. Please give love to R. Manus Alda Wilson, and keep much for yourself, beloved Pandora – MGP Feb 14. 1929 Taormina Sicily Dearest Pandora:– No place cd be better to send a valentine from than this matchless spot. Our hotel looks down perpendicularly on the railroad station 700 ft below on the seashore. It is a 3½ mile zig zag drive up here! Such scenery, so sunny, so brilliantly fair and clear, such glorious cloud and light effects, such antiquity surviving in ruins like that of the Greek Theatre. We walked up to see them this morning, and sat in the warm sun looking off on the blue and purple sea. It was all so incredibly beautiful. One cant believe that any people wd. build a theatre holding 30000 people in so inaccessible a place, yet there it is! The town is here to prove that people will live in inaccessible places and enjoy them. They walk up and down the staircase streets carrying stone water jars on their heads, and everything else – bundles of faggots, laundry, crates of vegetables, etc. Women and donkeys to all the carrying. Men are carried. It makes me so angry to see great husky men riding on top of a load larger than the forlorn little beast that bends beneath its burden that I almost drag them off and throw them over the wall into the sea below!! I may end up as organizer in the S.P.C.A! Nothing, not even cruelty to children, makes me see red as does brutality to dumb beasts, and one sees plenty of it in Italy, generally unconscious brutality on the part of a man too stupid to know the wretchedness he condemns a helpless animal to endure. Feb 15 This morning my niece & I took a long walk. We climbed two peaks overlooking Taormina. The first was crowned by a ruined castle and deserted hermitage and church. The second much higher, [10 000] 2000 metres, has a little town on top, as well as the inevitable ruined fortress. It was a stiff climb, but the view rewarded us. They get water from cisterns, and we saw the women at a washing place some distance down the hill all chattering and washing their clothes at a long stone trough. Hardly anybody was to be seen in the strange little huddle of stone huts that made up the village, except half a dozen young men lounging around the square, all dressed up. We saw women watching little groups of goats or pigs far down the slopes. We passed a woman sitting under a low shrub and spinning with a distaff watching one pig. Her baby lay in her lap. We called buon giorno to her, and she called back, picked up the baby and tried to make it wave its hand at us. – all quite human and friendly. The pig took the opportunity to reach over into a terrace and snatch some lettuce growing there, whereupon with loud outcries and frantic gestures the woman dragged him back to the path of duty. A grand young stage-bandit in top boots, velveteen breeches and felt hat came along with a donkey loaded with hay. We offered to let them pass, but he tipt his hat and begged us to pay no attention to his unworthy ass. So we went on up, and as we approached the town we cd. see a row of mens heads watching our approach over the top of the wall. They were the heads of the idle young men referred to. It was like another world, that lonely, isolated little community. So grandly surrounded by mountains, sky, and sea, so primitive and purposeless in its human existence. There was a humble obelisk in the middle of the piazza inscribed with the names of some other idle young men who had died in the late war. The huts were low, tile-roofed, thick walled, crowded thick together. The streets crooked and just wide enough for donkeys and goats single file. All around the mountains were terraced, and carefully cultivated. The almond trees are in blossom, the peaches just beginning. 2 Truly Sicily is one of the beauty-spots of the world, and as far as we have had dealings with them, the people are sunny in disposition, and kind in their dealings with strangers. For instance, we were to have taken an all day auto ride around Elna today, but Miss McKeehan was ill and we called it off. I expected some unpleasantness with the driver and was prepared to give him compensation. To my surprise, my niece came back from her early morning call on him – the telephone man was not here yet and we cdnt. call up – saying he had said he was glad not to go today, and had been on the point of coming and telling us so! He brought her back to the hotel in his car by a circuitous route in order to relate to her the story of his life in America. He lived 9 years in Pittsburg Our desk clerk here at the hotel spent many years in America and we have run across several like him in the town. When you consider the smallness of Taormina, it illustrates what has been taking place all over Italy. It was like us to leave Rome the day the peace pact betw. the Vatican and Quirinal were signed! We missed the procession from St. Peters to the Lateran in which the Pope was to have issued from his "imprisonment" of 58 yrs. But anyhow we saw a real Sicilian carnival in Taormina on Shrove Tuesday. They had a band, floats, boys going around throwing confetti in your face, and a platform in the Piazza built up against the church where Sicilians in native dress danced the Tarantella endlessly. Two Old Soaks with herrings stuck in their hatbands in token of Lenten fare, with their arms around each other were merrily carroming from pedestrian to pedestrian, one singing a ditty full of weird slides and quavers, the other shakily playing a harmonica Standing in the church door was a brown friar, sandles on his feet, a full beard, a brown skull cap on his head, smiling indulgently. He was the only churchman we have seen here, altho there are many nuns. If it wasnt for celibacy on the part of the church, Italy wd. be overcrowded with a vengeance. The sun poured down. On the height above the town, the red ruins of the Greek Theatre watched the pagan festival below, and the plume of smoke rose straight up from the snowy peak of Etna. We could see the black line of the last lava flow streaming down almost to the sea from a new crater at the side of the top. Naxos, the first Greek settlement here was built on an ancient lava flow which can be traced by the green shallow water for a couple of miles or more out in the sea. Every second person in the hotel has a cold or the flu. So too in Rome. Nothing was said about it in the papers, however, any more than anything was said about the treaty with the Vatican until it was actually signed! The papers here print what they are told and nothing else. They are small, ill printed on cheap paper, and carry next to no advertisements. A Buick ad in the Messaggero was the funniest thing of the kind I ever saw. It was scaled down from one of the full page illustrated ads in the N.Y. papers, and the transformation of the brawny youth with a jaw lounging on the running board conversing with the bright eyes at the wheel, into an upright Italian gentleman in top hat standing and staring at the signorina in the driver's seat, was very diverting. My niece is keeping a list of all American products on sale in Italy. It is very long and varied. I must close now, dearest Pandora hoping with all my heart to hear good news from you soon, Lovingly yours – Mary Hotel Des Etrangers, Syracuse Sicily, February 16, 1929 Dearest Pandora:– The mail brought me this morning a splendid letter from Rosa Manus, so full of all that I have longed to know, so fine and generous and devoted to you that I wept into my coffee, for I was having my collazione in camera, the way the Romans do. I say I wept. It was the Kodak of you in the greenhouse on your birthday that broke up the fountains of the great deep! It didnt hurt the coffee any, my tears. Nothing can hurt European coffee. Nature and man had done their worst before it got to my breakfast tray. The salt water merely added a new distaste to the familiar collection of old, unhappy flavors. I believe the Bible says something about evil doers being obliged to drink their tears, but the Prophet hadnt tasted Italian coffee – or chicory, or he wd. have been prepared with a worse beverage by far. Now I am answering Rosa's letter by writing chiefly to you, because she said you like to get my letters, and I know well what gives you amusement will please her better than any reply I could write to her. We came from Taormina to Syracuse in a deluge of rain yesterday. It wd. have been a very scenic ride if we cd. have seen anything along the coast. As it was, the rain did slack up just as we reached Mascali where the last lava flow stopt. I told you we cd. see the long smoking black line of it from the Gk. Theatre at Taormina, starting from the new crater Well, we passed within 20 ft of the end of it at Mascali, with some buildings half-toppled over and the great deadly pile of cinders heaped against them on the farther side, just where the lava was staid last fall. It was a frightful sight. It was steaming in the rain. We realized for the first time something of the enormity of an eruption. From Taormina one cd. hardly understand why the lava shd. flow at all, the slope seemed so gradual. but slope or no slope, here it was almost in the sea from the crater [30] 15 miles away. I believe now all they tell me about lava running out under the sea with terrific explosions of steam when it strikes the water, as Pindar described it 2500 yrs. ago. Mascali was partly engulfed, but the lava stopt just as it reached the railroad track. Before I forget it - I sent you a cable on your birthday and if you didnt get it, I want to blow up the Am. Exp. Co. in Rome. But I suppose I'll never find out. It seems it took more than a month for my Xmas letter to get to you! At least it arrived Jan. 31, Rosa said! There's speed for you, as the snail said after he'd been a week crossing the road. Our hotel here fronts on the harbor. The water is deep and a big White Star Liner anchored almost under our balconies, yesterday. It was in this harbor that the struggle between Syracuse and Athens came to an end in the famous naval battle, 415 B.C. described with such grim splendor by Thuc[i]yd[y]ides that the crash of the ships and shouts of the fighters and frenzied cries of the spectators looking on the all-day duel echo here yet. The Athenians were defeated, 7000 of them were captured and thrust into the open prison of the Stone Quarry, there to die in torment while the Syracusans walked around the top of the quarry daily and enjoyed the sight. You will remember the fine anecdote of the liberating of one or two Athenian prisoners because they could repeat some verses from a new tragedy of Euripides, unknown in Syracuse. They were told to go back and present themselves to the poet and tell him they alone of all who had gone out against Syracuse were spared for Euripides sake! Ive forgotten what happened to 2 the Athenian generals, Nikias and Demosthenes. Nikias was bent on fighting. Demosthenes wanted to abandon the siege and go back to Athens while the going was good. But while Demosthenes was advising, an eclipse of the moon took place, and that settled it! The advice was bad. I guess they had both fell fighting, and they were lucky in view of what befel the survivors. You have heard of the Fountain of Arethusa. Well, it is right here in the garden of this hotel, clear and abundant and with a flock of ducks living in it. Feb. 17 It rained most of the day yesterday, but last night it cleared and nothing cd. be lovelier than the view of the harbor and Mt. Hybla beyond, with the quiet ships at anchor here and there, and the moon overhead, while all night long the passers by were singing merrily. Ive had a touch of the flu, was in bed with a temperature yesterday. Rosa's letter was a godsend. It was so encouraging about your prospects of recuperation. I have been indescribably worried, Pandora, and Rosa never will know how happy her optimism made me. She ended her letter, "I think I am the luckiest girl in the world," and she is. I can imagine nothing more enviable than the privilege of being able to help you carry on. Doubtless the Conference was too great a strain on you, and shingles is the very devil! But you will soon be home, and for heaven's sake take it easy. Keep away from crowds. I wonder you didn't get flu in Washington along with all the rest. A letter from Daisy Lewis said she had had a letter of thanks from you for a basket of apples, which "would make me green." it was so lovely! As if I cant stand it to hear you speak an ardent word to one of the Lord's saints! I want you to know that you made her deeply happy. She always has worshipped you. It shd. make you very pleased with yourself, dearest Pandora, to count over the list of your devoted friends past and present. Not many of us succeed in acquiring two or three who really are friends, and you have 'em by the score. Besides those you know about, there are the far more numerous ones who have seen and heard and perhaps casually met you once or twice, and who treasure the memory. You ought to be immortalized for something which I daresay never will be mentioned in connection with your more solid claims to fame, and that is the amazing fact that a woman who was brainy, energetic, a leader, and all the rest, was also a creature of the most heart-breaking charm. Power, virtue and enchantment dont often inhabit the same domicile, Pandora, now do they? And how lovely that Kodak of you on your 70th is! Mrs. Raymond Brown said, last year at the banquet of the Cause and Cure, "Most people lose their good looks with age, but Mrs. Catt is just as lovely as she ever was." You must try to let yourself get thoroly rested from this last effort before you start off on a new one. The trouble with you is you want to live on your capital instead of your income. My pen has given out, and I must finish with pencil. Elizabeth Hauser told Miss Sherwin to make me an alternate to the Berlin Congress, and the latter has invited me. What do you know about that? You said they wdnt. ask an old suffragist. Arent those "33 Patriotic Women's Organizations" under the puissant leadership of the shrimp Brosseau making fools of themselves? Just like the old antis, they imitate every move of the liberal forces. It must make you laugh, their starting a conference to offset the Cause & Cure, without an idea in their heads except what they steal from you. I shd. be surprised if it didn't turn out someday that they are financed by something they shdnt. be. In no other way can one account for their ease in getting up meetings and having them attended. As for their methods, they ought to be dragged to court for slander. It was hard on Mrs. Sherman to have to explain her literary activities, poor woman. Another time I guess she'll look closely into the source of her orders. Good night, beloved Pandora. I hope you are back home again. Naples, March 1, 1929 Dearest Pandora; Where were we when I wrote last? Syracuse? Agrigento? Palermo? I think I wrote from Sicily somewhere. Well, from there we came to Naples & crossed the Bay by boat to Sorrento, where we staid at the delightful Cocumella Hotel a week. We had fair weather, one or two rainy days, took the shore drive to Amalfi and Ravello, the latter perched in the clouds. Too much cannot be said about that drive. It is beautiful beyond words, following the curves of a bold and deeply convoluted shore, carved in the side of the cliffs, overlooking the bluest of seas. We visited a couple of old Italian villas at Ravello, whose gardens would give you palpitation of the heart for pure extasy. They seemed to be on top of the world, such a view! and the flowers, walks, trees, marbles, fountains, – nobody can make a more noble and enchanting garden than your Italian. It is at once stately and full of original grace, a civilized not a natural garden. Not that I prefer civilization to nature, but that the former has its fine features, not to be gainsaid. We made the inevitable Capri trip, and Mary Gray & I had a glorious afternoon rowing along the Sorrentine shore on a perfect day in a small boat. We rowed out to Capo di Sorrento, where there are quite extensive ruins of a Roman Villa, and our boy guide, who went along to direct us and row if we got tired, took us under an arch in the rocks so low we should never have seen it into a little circular rock-enclosed pool which had been the swimming pool of this same Roman Villa. There was masonry and the remains of frescoes all around the sides. A fallen mass of masonry in the bottom of the pool showed that there had once been a dome over the pool with a central aperture for lighting it, like the Pantheon at Rome. Nothing more delightful in the way of a swimming hole cd. be imagined! Fresh water continually rushing in thru the opening into the bay in long swells which washed the edges of the pool and then withdrew, water as blue and pellucid as crystal, nature at her mildest and art at its most unaffected. Those old Romans certainly loved water as well as the English do! The thing you can always count on their having is water in fountains, pools, baths big & little, and lead pipes. Speaking of this brings me to our visit yesterday to Pompeii. We spent most of our time in the new excavations, and came home more dead than alive! I saw more lead water pipes in Pompeii than in all the rest of my life put together. Big ones to carry water along the streets, small ones to conduct it into the houses and all over the houses. Hot water pipes & cold water pipes, faucets, traps, everything connected with plumbing. We saw laundries for public washing, the sign in big red letters, Greek & Roman, beside the door on the front of the house. But if they were long on water, they were short on windows – and still are in all poor quarters of Italian cities. They had a big door opening into the shops, and that was all the light they had. In the laundries, they had a back wash room opening on an inner court, sometimes planted with flowers & vegetables [now replanted according to original designs on walls of Pompeiian houses] where they hung clothes in the sun to dry. The Italian government is restoring if the wind changes. Vesuvius isnt a third of the height of Etna. I want very much to go to Herculaneum and see the new excavations there. We go back to Rome, Sunday the 10th of March, to stay a week taking in Ostia, Tivoli, the pumping operations at Lake Nemi, and other trips which we didnt get in while we were there in the winter. It occurred to me in connection with what you wrote about thinking it wise to have a friend with you on the voyage across the Atlantic, in case you come to Berlin in June, that Clara Hyde might like to come. I havent mentioned this to her, nor has she to me. But if she cd. come and at that time, I am sure she wd. be glad to accompany you if you have not by this time made other arrangements. I do feel that you should not attempt it alone. Do you know whether or not Elizabeth Hauser is coming? I read the report of the Italian Commission of Investigation into the Nobile Expedition, and very much to my surprize it was not a whitewash. – blamed Nobile for loss of dirigible, and for deserting his men on ice floe, said the two officers who accompanied the Swedish scientist Malmgren on the attempt to reach land were "deserving no praise". The only ones to get a hearty kind word were the Russians, the French and Scandinavian aviators, and Amundsen, the last named being accorded a high tribute for "chivalry". This is the last of Nobile, and he feels his disgrace to the full. It is noon, and I must get ready for Vesuvius, if we go. Looks pretty smoky up there, but its a glorious sunny day. I wonder how you are getting along? Is Rosa there still? If so give her my love, also Alda. I think about you a hundred times a day. Clara isnt cabling me, so you cant be declining. Love to you. M.G.P. 2 whole streets and houses to their original condition in the new excavation, adding second and third storys in the large houses. It is going to be a wonderful reproduction when it is finished, furnisht with original furniture and reproductions. As it is now it is wonderfully interesting. There are kitchens as they were left in August, 79 AD. with pots on the ranges, dishes on the tables, doors open where the cinders accumulated so that the fleeing owners couldnt close them. In one recently excavated large mansion, nine skeletons lie where they fell in one room in the center of the house. Skeletons or casts or heaps of bones lie in in many others, sometimes huddled against outside walls in the street. In the School of the Gladiators adjoining the theatre, sixty five bodies were found. The hot cinders accumulating on the roofs set fire to the timbers and the roofs caved in on wretches already suffocated or dying. You probably have read the account written by the Pliny the Younger, then a boy of 17, of the whole catastrophe, including the death of his uncle, Pliny the Elder. Its worth rereading. There are many well preserved original frescoes in the new excavations, and they are protected by glass and curtains, as are election notices, signs, names of houses etc on the walls. One of the finest houses in the city hasnt been excavated yet. I shd. think they couldnt leave it alone! My niece & I may go up Vesuvius this afternoon if the wind isnt blowing. Everybody else in the party tells us it is an awful undertaking, filled with danger and difficulty!! But my niece is hipt on it! and I confess to a sneaking urge myself to look down into the crater. The funicular goes way to the top, so I cant see where there is much danger except from suffocation Florence, March 24. 1929 Dearest Pandora:– A longer time than usual has elapsed since I wrote you last. I've been on the go. After Sicily we had a week in Sorrento, a week in Naples where I had a wonderful time, inspecting new excavations at Herculaneum & Pompeii, and going up Vesuvius and having hot lava drop on my head! Yes, it did, and I picked it off my hat before it burned a hole and am bringing it home to show you. The ascent was easy but thrilling – an ideal combination. We had our doubts on the funicular going up the last leg of the journey, as the wind changed and blew the smoke right over the path we had to take to the crater and we had a strong whiff of sulphur. But a gust blew up the mountain continually, induced probably by the continually ascending column of hot air from the crater, and while the smoke was just over our heads, a great rolling, luminous saffron-colored cloud of it streaming off toward the Bay, the ascending current of air from below kept the air space nearest the ground clear and sweet. However it was as near as I want to get to a volcano, and the sullen explosions far down in the bowels of the mountain, followed by a wild gasp of escaping steam and particles of hot lava, and flaming gas fulminating thru the smoke, was as awe-inspiring a spectacle as I ever have seen and heard. Especially terrific to people who know what happened there 2000 years ago, for I never have seen anything so stupefying as the buried theatre at Herculaneum. Ninety feet of stone-hard lava lies above the arena of the theatre, and the modern town is built on top of it. While we were wandering around the tunneled passages of the theatre, laboriously picked out by convict labor, we could hear the dull rumble of carts and autos 90 ft above. But I wont repeat what I wrote Clara about those towns. She probably read the letter to you. I will come on to Ostia and Nemi. Ostia is most illuminating as to the life of a commercial city. Its houses are exactly like the houses in the old quarters of Italian cities today, from 3 to 5 storeys, few or no windows on ground floor, a wide door forming the entrance to the house and serving for window as well. Most ground floors were used for shops, and there the goods were huddled on shelves to the ceiling and the merchant sat in the middle of the floor and fought with the customer over prices, just as they do today. In Naples, Rome & Florence carpenters, shoemakers, metal workers etc work in these literal caves all day 2 at tasks requiring good light. I dont wonder there is much defective vision in Italy today. They have been straining their eyes ever since they began living in caves as aboriginees. We saw several very extensive houses of the better class. In one, newly excavated and left in its original state with furniture and bricabrac, we saw the wooden staircase to sleeping rooms on second floor, (beams of stair charred) and one room with two wooden frame (charred) bedsteads, a charred cabinet with shelves wh. contained a collection of statuettes and other curios, resembling your famous cabinet of teakwood filled with caravans and processions of little foreigners. It brought the past very close to the present to go thru that house. We took auto trips to the various towns around Rome.-- Frascati, Hadrians Villla, Villa d'Este etc. What a place Hadrians Villa is! He kept adding to it all thru his reign. We went out to Nemi to see the lake and the galleys! It certainly was an arduous day. The lake is in an old crater with precipitous sides and we found no way to climb down except a path which wd. be difficult for a fly to negotiate. Nobody of my own age in the party wd. attempt it, but my niece and a friend of hers were bent on going down and taking a boat out to the galleys, so I pluckt up courage & started with them. They went ahead, and like Lot and his party escaping from Sodom, they were instructed not to look behind them to see what I was doing! I folded my skirt about me and backed down on hands and knees. I never went down a worse incline, and wondered all the way down how on earth we were going to get back up again. Well, we landed safely on the shore of the lake, and walked toward a camp where the pumps were about a mile off. When we got there, we saw about 25 soldiers and workmen sitting around on the pumps, doing nothing. It was 2 p.m. They said the pumps were out of order, hadnt been working for a couple of days. Also the recent rains had filled the lake up to where it had been 6 wks ago!! We asked for a boat to row us out to the galleys. They said that 4 days before an order had been issued forbidding them to take tourists out to the galleys. Of course we knew why. They didnt [wat] want folks to see what slow progress is being made at pumping the water out. We asked if the galleys cd. be seen from the shore. They said yes, and waved us on to the place where they were. So we looked at their collection of things brought up by divers and inspected the pumps, and started around the lake. After walking indefinitely and seeing no prospect of the galleys ever being reached, I sat down on a rock and told the others to go on at if they found anything 3 to call and I wd. join them. I happened to have stopt in front of a ruined temple, and after they had gone, I walked around the foundations and picked a bunch of beautiful fragrant violets, and altogether enjoyed the lovely scene, the silence, the long shadows down the sides of the crater, the tinkling bells of grazing cattle & goats. After a long time the girls came back. They found where the galleys were alleged to be. Some more soldiers were sitting around there. Nothing to be seen. So we started back for the return climb. A little boy met us and said there was an easier way back to the town, and we hired him to guide us up a zig-zag path, longer but easier, to the top. We asked him how old he was. Eight yrs. – Did he go to school? No, he had to watch the cow. He had been once. He hoped sometime to go again. He was a sober, soft spoken little chap, brown and friendly and not obtrusive. After we got to the top we were in an entirely different part of the town from where we left the car and had the dickens of a time getting back to it. Altogether we spent two hours on those precious gallies, and the rest of the party were tearing their hair, wondering if we had fallen into the lake. And thats the story of our efforts at Lake Nemi! We drove up to Florence thru the Hill Towns, Perugia, Siena, and Assisi the high spots. Up here we are in the Middle Ages and early rennaissance. Fortunately the moon is at the full, and we have had perfect weather. Assisi certainly is a place which has the atmosphere of its two great spirits, St. Francis and St. Clare. We all felt it. Nevertheless, there are great churches and convents there to their memory, and that is precisely what the two saints fought against all their lives. They protested against the church's acquiring wealth, and vowed themselves to perpetual poverty. But no sooner were they under ground and canonized than the inevitable church-building and accumulation of great foundations began. The Franciscans go around in brown robes & sandals but their order has as much property as any other. The Saint himself was a great liberal and a feminist, or so I seem to infer from my very superficial reading. Dear Pandora, Ive decided to sail for home April 29, arriving about May 6. I want to see you. That is my reason for coming. I want to see if you are really coming to Berlin. If you do go, I shall try to get passage back to Europe again so as to be there with you. If you dont go, I dont care to. Rosa wrote me a letter from her steamer, addressed to Paris, wh. I havent got yet. Probably it has been forwarded to Rome and will be re-forwarded here, telling me your plans. She sent a note to me at Rome, telling me of the Paris letter. But anyway I want to come home to see how you are getting along. I cabled Clara I was coming yesterday. Give my love to Alda. I fear you will miss Rosa's indefatigable nursing, but of course she has to get things in shape at Berlin. Good bye, beloved Pandora. – M.G.P. Hotel Cocumella, Sorrento March 1. 1929 My dear dear Pandora:– Your letter awaited me here on my return from Sicily, day before yesterday. I was more than overjoyed, but you ought not to have used up your little strength writing to me. It takes pep to write letters! I want you to use your pep getting back to normalcy. Your remarks about coming to Berlin filled me with conflicting emotions. First, the unregenerate selfish eagerness to have you come over, and to be here to welcome the imperial Founder of the Alliance when she arrives. Hard on the heels of this selfish desire came a sober second thought. – Is it worth risking Pandoras health for? I note that you have been advertized as making a speech there Of course if you go your speech will be the high spot of the meeting. How well I remember that speech at Stockholm, and the open air speech from the balcony at the seaside park at sunset!! What a picture, the pine trees, the blue water, the lights of midsummer in the flaming sky, the crowd looking up at you as you spoke to each nation in turn. I realize how deeply you are wanted in Berlin and how you feel you must go. But you are not something we can afford to risk on anniversaries, Pandora. You have several years of the most valuable and momentous effort of your life ahead of you, if an accident doesnt carry you off. Washington might have been such an accident. It is true that it sometimes is worse to deny oneself than to spend oneself. It might have been worse for you not to go to Washington than it turned out to be after you had gone. But dont get the notion that going to a convention is a laudable way to die! Not for Pandora. Its too extravagant a squandering of treasure. A good deal depends on leadership in the next few years in the Disarmament movement in America. You are the outstanding woman leader. God isnt calling you to Berlin if you are not equal to going. He is certainly telling you to conserve your strength for a higher call. You are not justified in risking your life, beloved Pandora, because we all just love having you on the platform where we can look at you, and listen to you If I might lip-in with some advice, it would be this: Reserve passage so you can go if you are able, but if you get nervous over the prospect, cancel the reservation ruthlessly. Dont take any chances. You can win back to considerable activity if you give yourself time, and this world needs you a long sight more than the next one does. I feel this need so strongly that I am compelled to adjure you to think it over very carefully before you commit yourself to the trip irretrievably. In fact dont decide definitely. Let things shape themselves. I think nothing is more depressing 2 than the feeling that a big job is bearing down on one in the future, something that each day brings nearer. It saps ones vitality just dreading it. Seventy years isnt much nowadays. Look at Arthur Balfour playing tennis at 75 and Lloyd George cavorting and carroling around like a colt. Look at Clemenceau and lots of old birds like him. You neednt get the idea that you are done, and that it doesnt make much difference what you do. It may make the difference between a saved and a lost world. You know as well as anybody ever did that a great leader truly consecrated and really intelligent is Natures one priceless gift to mankind. So then, your life is not something to be lightly wagered. It must be kept in the Ark of the Covenant, cherished and preserved to the utmost by all of us. It was a wonderful trip in Sicily. Palermo was a noble wind-up. There was a coming together of more epochs of history than in any place I ever saw. – Carthage, Greece, Rome, Goth & Vandal, Norman, Saracen, French, Spanish, – in short every great race stopt awhile in Palermo. Roger II in 1030 was the most engaging monarch. He was a Norman and finally whipt the Saracens, and turned to building after he was thru fighting. He selected Saracen architects and workmen and the result was something the like of which Europe has not equalled elsewhere. The Cappella Palatina in the Palace at Palermo, the cathedral at Monreale and the cathedral at Cefalu are his chief landmarks, and they are landmarks. There is a combination of sternness, gorgeousness, and grace that beats the world. Youre sick of hearing about churches and I thought I was sick of seeing them till I struck Palermo. Then we saw the ruined Greek temples at Agrigento and the ruined Carthaginian city at Solunto, later rebuilt as a Greek settlement. It was perched on top of a high cliff the way all the oldest settlements were. I shd. think everybody wd. have died of heart disease climbing up and down. Its a queer thing that such a situation today wd. be the most dangerous possible as exposed to air-raids! Sicily was a different world. We found our first real beggars there. We saw the first barefooted women, the first rude and unfriendly curiosity we experienced anywhere, the last was in Cefalu. They are living in the dark ages there. The town is swarming with poverty-stricken men & women and children, and living conditions are unspeakable. Indeed poverty stalks naked thru central and western Sicily. I was horrified at the erosion of the soil in the interior, and felt as tho the men in their capes with pointed hoods riding the little donkeys were moving pictures out of the year when Cicero made his oration against Verres. We are staying here in Sorrento a few days at a hotel which is an old monastery. My window looks out on a lovely garden, mountains, the Bay of Naples and Vesuvius in the distance We went to Capri today, a grim and fateful place I thought. Tiberius was a strange, tragic character, much maligned by the slanders of the Patricians who hated him and whom he hated. 3 Vesuvius is not as stupendous as Etna, but it is something more comprehensible. You can visualize what happened in 79 A.D. The whole top of the mountain blew off, fully a third of it, and the shattered debris, mingled with mud, gas, and lava rained down on the garden of Southern Italy. We are going to see the new excavations at Pompeii & Herculaneum from Naples. There is a beautiful column of steam rolling up from the new crater at one side of the old. It shows like silver in the light of the full moon. Indeed few sights can surpass the Bay of Naples with that purple volcano looming like Fate in the background, and the cliffs of Capri facing it across the blue and sparkling water. – Just here I looked at my watch & saw that it is midnight, and went to my window to take a farewell look before turning in. The late moon was just risen over a gorge between two mountain peaks, the lights of several villages ringed the shore of the bay clear to Naples on the opposite side from Sorrento, and Vesuvius was pouring up smoke thru which a red glare flickered sullenly, reddening the sky. It is the first time I have seen that, and it is a stupendous sight. Some pope said Vesuvius was the mouth of hell. He must have seen it just like this with a vast black cloud streaming from the crater down its sides and clear across the bay out to sea, white steam rolling up over the edge shot thru with this deep sullen red that flares up to the sky and fades and flames again. It is a sight never to be forgotten. I am so glad you are safe at home again. How happy Rosa must be to have brought you there safe if not sound! Now, Pandora, dont get scared about your heart. The doctor said a true word about its being over worked. You have passed thru a bad, bad year without respite, and are feeling the effects. You have lived twice as long and four times as hard as the rest of us, but then you have that much more power than other folks. If you can let up, I firmly believe you have your crowning and monumental achievement still ahead and not behind you. You said a true word about the significance of the Papal accord here. It came on Italy like a thunder clap, but what they lacked in press advance notices, they are making up since. The papers are full of it, lauding it to the skies etc. etc. I'll have something to say about it later, I notice many of the letters I get are opened. I wonder about those I write? Seems queer. Not that I care. The world is free to read my priceless correspondence. Only I dont dare write love letters! Please consider 'em writ between the lines!! Give my love to Rosa and Alda. Ever your most devoted and inexhaustible MGP Florence, Via Tornabuoni 3 April 6, 1929 Dearest Pandora:– I was thrilled to actually get a hand-written letter from you yesterday, addressed in that proud, assured, unwavering Spencerian hand that will die with you! Your handwriting always makes me think of what Gibbon or somebody said about the Roman toga, – "The Toga disappeared when the last Roman Senator was carried to the tomb," or words to that effect. You were taught that writing ought to be beautiful, and yours is beautiful. Then came the awful periods of experimentation, in which we still live, each period trying a new tack. Just now they are teaching children to print! Yes'm, Im telling you the very latest. They say it can be done as rapidly as writing I had a chance to try when I sent cables and telegrams, and had to print two copies of each message. Speaking from experience, it takes four times longer to print than to write the way I write! About your letter:– you say your symptoms are improving, but that the shingles are still shingling and that plenty of your symptoms are bad. You say you will cancel your steamer reservation if you do not by May 12th or thereabouts feel able to go to Berlin. I hope you will be able, but even so I dread to think of your depleting the slow accumulation of reserve strength in making that trip. Rosa and all the rest are ardent in wishing for your presence. The anniversary needs its Hamlet, but it seems to me that the world needs you far more. There is no other woman who can do what you are doing in this most critical time to organize the forces of forward-looking public opinion behind a new and sane world-order. There are many strong women who are backing you wholeheartedly, but admirable as they are in mind and heart, brilliant as some of them are and consecrated as nearly all are, they havent got the last touch that makes a truly great leader, and you have got it. Now think that over, and if your conscience still tells you to go to Berlin, I'll shut up and say no more. I realize fully that you may think you can do a good work in Berlin for this very cause of a new world order, all over Europe, thru the women that assemble there. But the strain of constant interviews, (and why go if you cant give them?) is something to be seriously considered. 2 Please believe me when I say I am writing all this contrary to my deep desires. I want you to go to Berlin and to be there with you more than I can express, dear Pandora! I remember Stockholm, the most hauntingly beautiful memory of a long, and impassioned friendship. It would be indescribably affecting to me to add another memory to the list. But not a heart-breaking memory of loss! So Clara and I are to start housekeeping in New Rochelle? Well, that sounds good to me! I hope the apartment will hold all my furniture and Clara and me as well! but I'll bet it wont!! Ive got 5 barrels full of dishes, and 19 boxes of books. a grandfather clock, four poster bed, 9 pairs of pillows two large davenports with chairs to go with both, mirrors for every wall, extra chairs to burn, and enough bedding etc to start 14 couples housekeeping. No apartment will contain all my possessions, and I dont expect it. But a large living room seems necessary. I hope to unload a lot of my stuff on my niece when she gets married, but that will not be for a year or two. Ive got two fine old desks as large as pianos, and a piano, besides two walnut bookcases and my Encyclopedia Brit. bookcase! Every minute I see another spectre of furniture in storage rise before me! My mother's horse-hair sofa and the mahogany chest of drawers! Let us turn away our eyes from the contemplation of my impedimenta! When you think of what I sold besides what I kept, you wonder I am alive to tell the tale of breaking up that farm-home. Happily my parents left our huge oil painting of Hagar and Ishmael in the Desert, somewhat larger than your Aurora, to my brother Fred, and Cora, his widow, has got to do the worrying over that! Its a beautiful thing in a very old Italian frame, but it's as big as the side of a barn. So you have a job for me, something of an irate and denunciatory nature evidently. Well, cuss words come easy to me. What I lack your long and fruitful vocabulary can supply. If the Wom. Party has been lying about us again you must remember "it is their nature to." Our days in Florence are drawing to a close. It is a wonderful city, one of the great cities 3 of the world,– one of the greatest. In looking at the list of the great men and women of Florence, no other place can match their number in so short a period of years. I have been reading a 2 vol. set of the History of the Medici family, and am in the right spot to read it. All I have to do is to lay down the book and go look at the thing mentioned. It has been borne in on me that the ancient Etruscan race is the basis on which the glory of modern Florence has been raised. We leave here for Venice Tuesday April 9. stay 3 or 4 days, then go to Milan for a day, and back to Paris where we go to the American University Women's Club, 4 Rue de Chevreuse, to stay until we sail for home from Havre, April 29, SS De Grasse, French Line. If you go to Berlin I shall try to go too, but probably cant get passage on your boat at so late a date. We have done a lot of shopping for clothes, have some more to do in Paris, so our wardrobes are, or will be, attended to. I must close and go to meet a dental appointment. I have broken a tooth on Italian bread. My dearest love to you, Pandora Magnifica. Be good and do what is right by yourself. Ever yours– M.G.P. Transcribed and reviewed by contributors participating in the By The People project at crowd.loc.gov.