Letter from M. Carey Thomas to Mary Elizabeth Garrett, August 31, 1890

Dearest Mary, It is craven spirited in me to write to you this evening for there was no letter in Berlin, only a sch. med. Child document (do tell her to write regularly 1.2.3.4 etc - it is annoying to skip about on a business letter), and my St. Petersburg letter was surely laborious if not successful and deserved an acknowledgement. But out of your severe and somewhat dry business remarks (unjust they were too, for you never told me about the St. Louis and the Chicago Committees) came somehow or other, a sense of how bored you were, and how tired and such a desire to do what I could to make the stupid cure time pass, that here I am [illegible] writing to you, as if letters were any good. Moreover when you get this you will be spreading your weeks to fly away. Do fly somewhere into the Empyrean and get away from it all. Leave us all behind for a few weeks. You will be the better for it. This summer I have managed a few flights. I have really forgotten, and I fancy that has been one reason why it has been harder to write even to you. Did I tell you that I tried hard to work in London and could not, so I thought I would give myself one more summer of pictures and impressions but I think it is the last for some time. I feel so much better than for 3 years that it seems as if I could almost go back to the time before Bryn Mawr. For before I had adjusted the new life there came MotherGÇÖs illness and my 3 last years. What a chance it all is - one has prepared and is ready to try and a grief a passion, whether love or friendship or for something unattainable it does not matter, what Bourget would call a grand chagrin and the trying is inifinitely retarded. I suppose all our inherited tendencies descend upon us to keep us back if we try to differ in any way from the rest. I want you to read BourgetGÇÖs Un Coeurde Femme. There is nothing you would object to in it, not a page, and it is wonderfully touching and true. We are like that it is with us all a chance. I intended to mail you the book but by mistake it got in a package of other books addressed to Bessie. It seems to me that I have had everything possible, and for an American, a Baltimorean, my love for pictures and beautiful things (things so far away) is like a taste for horse racing, or drink, or women, and equally to be regretted. We leave for Paris Wednesday and reach Rheims on Thursday evening and there we shall stay for a day. Saturday make an excursion to Leon and Saturday evening reach Mlle Finlaison 7 Rue Galilee. Do you know Rheims was my first great French Cathedral. We saw it on our way to Paris just after I had taken my degree and I can remember sitting for hours completely silent. It makes me almost afraid to see it again to remember so well. I remember too that part of the time there I thought of you for when I took my degree I wrote for the first time in along while and you had answered. I remember too the sonnet I thought but did not send of course, and the shadow of the grand chagrin of Rome. Talking of sonnets, your man Protens has written another volume of poems that are I believe praised so much that I fear I shall have to overcome my repugnance and read it as well as his first volume even if you did send it from Deer Park to Mrs. Franklin. Mr. WhiteGÇÖs engagement has greatly shocked me. He was one of my favorites and now I suppose when he spent 5 hours in my study talking so sweetly a year ago he was considering whether I would do for a 2nd wife. His first wife was so very different and so infinitely superior to Helen McGill. If you return the 4th of October you need not spoil your month of soaring by school details - so till we meet in the prison house of American goodbye unless you wish otherwise. Keep as many and whichever of the photographs you like. I hope the baths have cured your hands that I like so much. If it should not be a ringday I kiss them Russian fashion in parting. Yours Minnie C Th (included are newsclippings)