I have not written since my word in the train. Too busy taking up daily threads, and there have been various dinings and lunchings out. On my return I found yours saying that another yellow-stamped instalment of the Arabian Nights Entertainment had come in on your breakfast-tray. Just put Mexicans instead of Persians, or whatever they were, intrigues for power in a Latin-American republic, instead of the intricacies of Haroun-al-Raschid and his califat, change your longitude, and you are "Orientée" as exactly as the pyramids!

January 19th.
(My brother's birthday).

To-night I am thinking of Elliott,[30] and, as so often, before his days of physical and spiritual anguish, of the beautiful brow with its lines of thought, and the straight limbs as he moved freely among the other sons of men. But however dear in his activities, where pride was a factor, he is infinitely dearer to me now, stretched, broken, while others divide his garments. I ask myself to-night at this seventh turning of the years of pain, what I have not asked him. Has he drunk the chalice, or is he still putting it away?

His mind is naturally occupied with intellectual equations. He as naturally rejects the mystical; there is nothing "vicarious" to him. Life is only what rationally and definitely is to be discovered by each one, no possible doing of another's work. I remember quoting to him once, à propos of destinies and the end of the ends: "Ego sum alpha et omega, principium et finis," and he answered, "Each one is his own alpha and omega."

I know little, after all, of his spiritual life. His intellectual life I can read like any fine book, the technicalities of a trained mind superior to mine, inspiringly surmised, but not understood. He is not anima naturaliter christiana, but all the same, he must hang in his body on the cross of Christ crucified, and his only hope is in acceptance of it, along the lines of redemption, cut off as he is from the exercise of his splendid natural gifts. Results for him mean the hunting out of definite, secret combinations, in definite, scientific areas, and his mind is speculative only in an intellectual sense.

I shall, perhaps, never know how far the "Crucified" has convinced him, but to-night, in thinking of him, sitio comes again and again to me. He has been so thirsty for the employment of his gifts, whose value he knows, in a clear, common-sense way, as he also knows what has not been given him, and the suppression of that gift of industry seems sometimes to me the most painful nail that holds him. Don't let what I have written make you unhappy. Mother-wounds bleed and burn so easily.

In this quiet, beauteous night, with the patio holding a thick, silver moonlight spilling over the square, dark roof, this gorgeous Indian world in strange unrest about me, and I myself far enough away to see, I can speak. Show him this some time when he is healed. What an adoring sister thought cannot hurt. I unite myself with the millions who have had their loved ones hanging on the cross, who have heard their sitio. But as the emotions of each are measured by their personal experience, this, my brother's thirst, moves me more deeply than even that of sacramental martyrs, who gave willingly, where he gives resistingly. "And everywhere I see a cross where sons of men give up their lives." ...

January 20th.

Things are bubbling up, boiling, geyser-like, and the public in a fair way to get scalded. Yesterday a bill was passed through Congress suspending the constitutional guarantees in various of the near-by states, Morelos, Tlaxcala, Puebla, Vera Cruz, and others.

It would seem that all of Mr. Madero's chickens are coming home to roost, and demands for the cutting up of the Mexican cake sound from all sides. But what was easy for Madero to promise in the first passion for the regeneration of "his" people is proving not only impractical, but impossible. What's the use, anyway, of giving waterless lands to Indians without farming implements, whose only way of irrigating would be prayers for moisture to pre- or post-Cortésian gods? Let those who have been divested of their illusions by hard facts govern the state, I say.