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Dearest Mary, Yes your letter of Feb 16 came this morning, and I was very glad to get it for your last had told me so little. I canGÇÖt understand why you are still so tired - surely Miss PorterGÇÖs visit ought not to have tired you so and would not have tired you so before you left home - Think of Susan TraversGÇÖ tales. You did really see a number of people besides though and fancy a [illegible] in the Baths Diocletian. I remember very well your telling me about Mr. Valery and his going home. Happy man that his lot since has lain in Roman studios rather than in a little American RK town. And so she got you into the Sistine Chapel. I was going to ask how you had been so fortunate. I am glad she was nice and I wonder if you enjoyed having her at all. You did not say. Thanks for her note. Yes I cannot help thinking you had better try something else not Rome. Are you sure home would be worse? And if you are tired ought not the air to be bracing I wonder. Please think of leaving Italy and going wherever the air is best. The langerer of an Italian spring is gret - the twice I have experienced them I have known nothing like it. My exhaustion in those Roman gardens we visited that Spring forms a distinct background of its own to the tragedy. Ah how I wish now like Dodo and Mary we could meet at night and wander through them again - for us it would not matter that they have given place to appartment [sic] houses, nor would you be tired nor I busy. Do you think Mary dear you ought to be so very very blue when you knew so well by your imprudence last year and the year before and the intervening summer in the heat you were preparing for your self [sic] just such an experience as this and that it must be lived through. You must never do so again and I believe there is no reason why you should not be moderately strong because twice since I can remember you have approached it and you surely can again. BessieGÇÖs attitude does not seem to me discouraging, because she has never understood you or cared for you as a person would who really understood and it is sometimes even a comfort to me to have her less demonstrative because I always knew it was chiefly old acquaintance. Moreover she is a spoiled child utterly unamenable [sic] to reason and hopelessly self centred. The discouraging part of the experience is mine, because my eyes were opened to see this, which I think you always saw more or less. Her open demonstration about you will soon be over. I fancy it is over. Her attitude, internal attitude, will remain probably but it does not matter except as you are fond of her. She is a complete invalid in temper I mean and I can never treat her like an equal again. And just as soon as she cares less for me, which will be soon as I cannot feel the same or act as if I did, I shall cease to do more than keep up a friendly relationship. She is at home now but I missed seeing her as she just arrived as I left. I am sure there has been a family row since Mr. KingGÇÖs death and I trust it will result in BessieGÇÖs living alone. She will be much happier. This is sub est rosa however and Bessie has of course said nothing. I feel as if I never cared to see her again for my own sake and it is terrible to me to feel so now in the deepest grief she has ever had; and it shows me how far I have travelled from the paths of friendship since last year. Over BessieGÇÖs feeling then you need not be blue I think. And so with other things. Please do not be blue. Ho will you get well if you are blue I should like to know. Now about myself - last week was very busy. I saw no one but devoted myself to business and even yet I have not had time to look over the school books. I am deeply disgusted at the amount I have to do and to cap the climax on Friday just before I left one of our Seniors and an English group student was taken with scarlet fever. I came back Sunday evening to find that neither Dr. Gerhart nor the head of Denligh nor Dr. Rhoads had taken proper quarantine regulations, and a panic was spreading among the students and a justified panic. It took most of today to make hermetic arrangements - two nurses, no communication. 4 girls moved off the nursery floor, Dr. Gerhart seen etc. Now comes the afterwave. Students to expostulate, students frightened etc etc. And no one here, it seems, to realise things but me. I am truly exasperated. Then one of our Greek men. Dr Smyth getting here 1700 has received an offer $3500 and I donGÇÖt know what to do, to give him 2500 on the chance he will stay. Another Geddings refused $3500 and the post Dr. Ely has just accepted. Rimsen has received an offer of 7000 to go to Chicago, which is really to be a great university and a dangerous rival of the Hopkins it seems and I am in terror lest he accept. It has been a free fight for men this year with Wisconsin. Leland Stanford and Chicago opening. Perhaps this miserably paid profession will profit in that prices will be raised. Do not worry about your cables - you forget that $70 you sent me by mistake. I am paying all your private debts out of it, Miss AndrewsGÇÖ $25 etc. I am sorry to say it is not exhausted. Well it looks as if the combination against us would succeed next Monday. Dixon who is now Pres. of the Hospital is sure, but Laurie Riggs they will not have James McLane who had promised his son Allan LaurieGÇÖs intimate friend to vote for him turned around on the board he is such a body to Frank White and said GÇ£no he would not do he is a Princeton manGÇ¥ and Laurie has studied 2 years at the Hopkins and knows it down to the ground. James McLane is either or worse he has neither sense nor honesty, they say. He was put in for Frank White to pull his strings and he always [illegible] to order. So we have dropped Laurie and are trying to write the opposition on someone else. Still you will know before my letter reaches you - the chances with a packed board are however 1000 to 1 against us. Dr. OslerGÇÖs new practice of medicine is the last excitement Henry wrote a great part of the nervous diseases and is much delighted by OslerGÇÖs reference to him. It is really an excellent book from an amateurGÇÖs point of view and I have read a great part of it. If you wish something thoroughly scandalous and slanderous out of it I have discovered that Tom Carey must have had for years a syphilitic disease called - the snuffles - It answers precisely to all his symptoms. You know of course that the fickle brother-in-law of Bertha Smith is engaged to Miss Lairfarx [?] in spite of his wifeGÇÖs terrible death (caused by him, indirectly at least) and they say his 3 children are veritable vixens and that Arthur George Braun Judge BraunGÇÖs son is said to drink, in pseudo council, for his fee ($500) was so impossibly big - a tribute to the schoolhouse I suppose - that we declined to go further - not giving the reason of course. Moreover the athletic club wants to buy the sawmill for their club house. Mr Pennington showed me the picture painted in watercolour by the new B&O station to go on our corner and although I do not admire his Romanesque style is not very bad. I hope they can get the open angle of green. Notice which letter comes 1st my B.M.S one marked Tuesday via Southampton or this mailed on Wed. via Queenstown and let me know. Yes I sent you the Whitall sch. extract via Aunt Hannah. I never imagined you could think me in Paris even for a moment knowing the impossibility. Now goodbye, this is a horrid letter to send after such a horrid birthday letter too, and I have been thinking of you often too and wishing, as I sometimes do, that I could be with you if only for one evening. How much would you exchange for it? A week of Miss Porter, of Rome? Yours longingly Minnie C Th Closed Tuesday evening March 1st
Letter from M. Carey Thomas to Mary Elizabeth Garrett, February 29, 1892
M. Carey Thomas writes to Mary Garrett expressing her doubts that travel is actually helping Garrett's health. Thomas alludes to tension in the relationship between Garrett and Bessie King and writes that Bessie's father's death will probably result in her living alone. Thomas also complains about a scarlet fever outbreak among students at Bryn Mawr and the fact that her professors are being poached by other Universities. A telegraph from Garrett to Thomas is included with the letter.
Thomas, M. Carey (Martha Carey), 1857-1935 (author)
Garrett, Mary Elizabeth, 1854-1915 (addressee)
1892-02-29
20 pages
reformatted digital
North and Central America--United States--Pennsylvania--Montgomery--Bryn Mawr
Europe--Italy--Lazio--Roma--Rome
BMC-CA-RG1-1DD2
M. Carey Thomas Papers, 1853-1935 --http://archives.tricolib.brynmawr.edu/repositories/6/archival_objects/98852
BMC_1DD2_ThomasMC_Outgoing_0398