You lost the chance of your lifetime, Mother. I broke off suddenly the learned lecture on rhetoric. Henri Imer and Herbert were coming in from their ride, and I had literally to jump down the stairs to get the glacé fruits out of the way in the kitchen before Herbert would burst in and find them there, spread out all over the room on buttered paper. We are a big family, and I made a lot.
I am thinking of my Christmases. This is the first I have ever spent away from you.
Tarsus, January eighth,
Nineteen-Nine.
It isn't because my husband is brand-new, or that we are living what is supposed to be "that difficult first year" that I object to separations. If this first year is difficult, come on the rest of the years, I say. But I already know, from our engagement days, what separations mean. Still, I saw quite distinctly, when Herbert's father sent him a check to go to the Holy Land, that he ought not to miss the chance. We may not get out this way again. I put it to myself: it will be a glorious thing to have done! So I told him he must seize the day. I could not accompany him for a reason that you may guess. I have not told you before: one doesn't always know one's self.
Our holidays and examinations are arranged according to the Oriental Christmases. So they come in January to take in the period from the sixth to the nineteenth. It isn't a long time for a trip: but the Holy Land is not far away. Herbert started off two days ago on the Greek Christmas, and I took Socrates down to Mersina with me to see him off. Being Socrates' Christmas, we could avoid our own lack of gaiety in the last meal by blowing him to a big dinner at the hotel.
You ought to have seen Herbert embarking for Syria, with Mr. Gould, an Englishman on our faculty, and half a dozen boys who live at Alexandretta, the next port—near enough and cheap enough to go home for the holidays. Mr. G. and Herbert took deck passage with the boys. It is January, with snow on the Taurus and cold winds on the Plain, but the Mediterranean blew hot on the day they left, and they could change to a cabin the next day, if it was too cold to spend the second night to Jaffa on deck. Herbert wore an old suit that we intended to throw away, and a black fez. With the beard he has grown to make him look older in the classroom, he is for all the world like a Russian pilgrim.
Herbert is to be gone two weeks. Work is an antidote for the "mopes." I tell myself that he may be delayed in returning, and that I may have to tide over the first few days of the new term. So I am working up psychology lectures. I chew over a phrase like William James's "states of consciousness as such" until I fall asleep. I have to begin all over again the next morning, for I cannot remember what he means by "as such."
Dr. Christie knows how to handle women to perfection. We are a small circle, and he says that wives must share in the faculty meetings. He declares that he wants our opinion and our advice, and that "the very best example set to the Orientals is to show them how we respect and defer to our women." But I know this is only half the truth. He takes us in, so that we won't be able to criticize decisions in which we had no part. I knit in faculty meetings. My college education never destroyed the woman's instinct to have hands constantly occupied. Only, I sometimes forget and go ahead at my knitting mechanically. The first baby-band I made in faculty meeting was big enough to go around Herbert. So I called it a cholera belt and gave it to him. Orientals love to talk and talk and talk and talk. So do Occidentals. And in faculty meetings I have discovered that men are not a bit less garrulous than women. Since I committed matrimony I've found to my surprise that the other sex has very much the same failings as mine. This comes out in faculty meetings. I bet I'd find the same thing in corporation board meetings. Every one loves to talk, listens impatiently to others when they talk, watches for an opportunity to get another word, and gives in through weariness or indifference rather than through conviction. The best talker has it over the best thinker every time.
Mersina, January eighteenth.
I have written you about the Doughty-Wylies, how they stopped for lunch with us in Tarsus on their way from Konia, the summer British Consulate, to the winter Consulate at Mersina, and what joy it was for us to meet them. A few days later, a letter came with the inscription "For the Youngest Bride at St. Paul's College." It was a week-end invitation for Herbert and me. We went down to Mersina the very next Saturday. That was in October. Since then, week-ends with the Doughty-Wylies have been in a certain sense oases—you understand what I mean. The British Consulate means that world of ours which seems far away, and is missed occasionally in spite of the novelty of Tarsus life and the cordiality of the missionaries. At the Dougthy-Wylies, I am able to dress in the evening, and Herbert always looks best to me in his dinner-coat. We are unconventional until we get back into convention: then we wonder how and why we ever broke loose.