And Sue Troyon I shall never forget or stop loving as long as I live. She put her arms about me and kissed me, when she first met me, right in the street, and never said a word, but her eyes were wet. She is a woman and a friend!
So now I am going to join you abroad, to travel and live among pictures and music and real people. These months out of society have broken the charm. I've tried to go back, but I can't stand it. The inanities of an afternoon At Home are more than I can bear. Everybody repeating to each other the same absurd commonplaces over and over again. Society conversation in one way is like a Wagner opera: it is composed of the same themes, which recur over and over again; only, in the conversation referred to, these themes are deadly, dull, fatuous remarks. As for balls and evening parties, I don't care about dancing any more, somehow, and to see the young débutantes about me almost breaks my heart, full of memories of my daughter and what she might have been. Tears are not becoming to a very low-necked dress, and shouldn't be worn with powder and jewels. No, my dear Mary, I see in this society of ours, we all grow so hardened, that if we don't have some such grief as I have had, we become hopeless. People soon forgot I had ever had a child, or at least that she hadn't been dead for years. I find myself becoming a bore, because of perhaps a certain lack of spirit that I used to have; and I began to realize that I had never been liked for myself, but for what I gave, and for the atmosphere of amusement which I helped to create by nearly always being gay and enjoying myself. As you yourself said of society, it is absolutely unsatisfactory. I never knew a purely society woman yet who wasn't somewhat or sometimes dissatisfied. First, they can't go as much or everywhere they want; and soon after they have all the opportunities they desire, they find that isn't sufficient, after all, to make life perfect, and then the boredom of fatigue begins to creep upon them with the years, and soon old age begins like a worm to eat into what happiness they have had.
Oh, no! When I think of how full your life is, of the interesting people you know—not merely empty names with a fashionable address or a coronet on their note paper,—of the places you see and the books you read; and then hear you say your life is too short to see or enjoy a third the world has to offer you! You happy, happy woman you!
Well! The house is for sale! What furniture I want to keep stored! John, who is prematurely old and half-dead with trying to earn enough money to keep us going as we wished in New York, has entered into it all in exactly my spirit. He has sold his seat on the stock exchange. He has disposed of all his business interests here. We find we have quite enough income to travel as long as we like, moderately, and to live abroad for as many years as we please. When we get homesick—as we are both sure to, for after all we are good Americans—we will come back here and settle down quietly in some little house, near everybody, but not in the whirlpool—on the banks of society, as it were, so that when we feel like it we can go and paddle in it for a little, just over our ankles. Two weeks after you receive this letter you will receive us! We sail on Kaiser Wilhelm to Naples.
No one here knows what to make of us! It's absurd the teapot tempest we've created. The verdict finally is that we've either lost our money or else our minds!
With a heart full of love,
Affectionately,
Agnes.
The Theatre