Letter from M. Carey Thomas to Mary Elizabeth Garrett, January 01, 1891

Dearest Mary, When you are to read this letter, between accounts or Miss Bradley, or in church I do not see - but after all that is your affair. I have been thinking over, as dispassionately as possible, with all the New YearG��s resolutions solidly in the background, the school question, and I want to say first that whatever you may succeed in doing I shall be satisfied with and I shall try to make my manner in the meetings exactly right. What ever the friction I can endure it; and I shall try to get over the mental strain and chain of miserable association that has hitherto interfered with my giving my best thought to the school. I have never been able really to think about it and so the school has never had my best efforts - and it must be so with the rest of us. So much for that side. Now I want to say that I believe a reconsideration would be entirely hopeless because the elements are hopeless, and it is not a question of agreeing or disagreeing. It is a question of feeling and must remain so nothing can alter what has gone before. I think I knew far better than you might think because Julia has talked to Mamie with frankness and to Bessie and it seems to me that friction cannot ever be avoided. Nothing will change her opinion on certain points and I am not referring to relations between you and me, and things will be in a blaze at a momentG��s notice. Personal issues have so coloured everything that, even to me, (and I believe not it is unconscious and involuntary because, whatever it may have been after I first came back from abroad, Julia must know now that nothing that she says can affect my opinion of you) there is never a time when I see her that she does not imply, or say, something disloyal to you. Long ago I realised, even at Deer Park, that if I wanted to keep my faith in you I could not talk to Julia. Then I thought it was a deliberate attempt to disillusion me - and of course my knowledge of you was so much less intimate than it is now - now it seems to me to show a distortion caused by personal feeling that has become involuntary and half unconscious. People generally have not clear sightedness enough to understand quite how impressions are given but both Bessie and Mamie have been given an intolerable impression. Kate, Lou, and Julia cannot possibly help feeling somewhat in the way; and even I hearing these things (and explaining them as I could better than anyone) have had to grasp my faith in you in both hands to keep it and my love for you pure. Now let me tell you why I tell you these things now and never have before and never shall again because I think my love for you has enabled me to see that unless you break through this ever contracting net of personal difference and friction and nervous strain your health will certainly break down and you will lose all possibilities of real goodness. I was in despair last Spring for you and for myself too. If Julia continues in the Bryn Mawr School the elements all the other elements will continue and the lesser fact that you and I agree will continue (for as long as I love you I shall agree for my agreement is part of my loving and one does not exist without the other) and we are not strong enough to master them, nor is Julia. I do not mean to say she has not tried. The time has come to go forward and it seems to me that a great drawback would be removed from all our lives and most of all from yours and JuliaG��s if for a few years we could need not meet together in circumstances where we perpetually had to discuss and divide on a vote. You must judge - I have told you now my grounds. I want to do dear Mary what is best for you and it seems to me that one plan has been tried long enough, although personally I will do whatever you wish. Only weigh both sides. Practically - whether Julia stays or goes. I will see that you have nothing to do with practical details this year and then after this year we will put all our minds on making the school as nice as its schoolhouse and we can do it of course for are we not nicer than other people in theory - however in the last 13 years our lives may have lagged behind. Nice music and not too much backache this morning. I found father delighted to see me and I talked to him in bed (he in bed) for a long time. He had just given me up. Yours lovingly Minnie C. Th He thinks Louis McLane does not matter and will help to defeat James McLane. He will say absolutely nothing about it.