Memoirs of a millionaire

by Lucia True Ames Mead

How strange that we should have known so little of each other, we who vowed that “ocean-sundered continents” should never make our girlhood’s love less warm! But after your change of name and transfer to the China Mission, while I was at Smith College, I lost sight of you, and, missing your letters, knew not where to write. So you will understand my long silence and know that the Mildred of ten years ago is the same Mildred to-day, only no longer a girl, but a woman.

A woman, with many ambitions unsatisfied, with many heroes dethroned, but with the same loves and hopes and fears, and with the same ideals, although their attainment seems farther off with the growing years.

I have slowly come to recognize and be reconciled to my mediocrity; to know that I have not had a thought but has been common to humanity; that I am no whit wiser or better than all my fellows; and that what you in girlish enthusiasm flattered me into believing was creative power was simply a capacity to appreciate and be moved by what was great.

I have longed for power, but, believe me, not for name or fame. Simply to have had the consciousness in myself that the world was better and wiser for my having lived would have made all drudgery and toil a joy and privilege. But the blessedness of giving and doing in a large measure has not been granted to me. Not that I blame fate or circumstance or environment. I have had health and freedom and friends; no hindrances and no great sorrows since mother left me alone five years ago.

The failure lies with myself alone. Sometimes there has been an unutterable loneliness and a longing for something, I know not what; but I suppose it must be for the love which has not yet come to me, and which now may never come.

But I do not let that burden me overmuch. I have my daily task. I love my work; and here, among my books, I thankfully count myself rich indeed in the society of all the great and wise and good of whose treasures I am the happy heir. I have traveled, too, and seen the Old World cities and the castles, palaces, and ruins of which we used to dream. It was not exactly the blissful experience I had fancied, for I was doomed to be the companion of a stupid old dowager whose money bought my time and service, and to whom I was useful as an interpreter of the arts and languages with which she was unfamiliar.

I saw a great deal and learned some things. It helped me a little towards reaching that goal of culture at which I aim, whence I can truly say that “I count nothing human foreign to me.” It helped to free me somewhat from the narrowness of my age and environment. I have become a little more of a Greek, a little less of a rugged Goth. Not that mere travel did this; if my eyes had not begun to be opened before, I should have seen nothing. I have verified nothing more thoroughly than Emerson’s saying, “Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful we must carry it with us or we find it not.”

I miss the picturesqueness and the charm of the Old World life. I am surprised to find how shocked and annoyed I am at the crudities and Philistinism of which I was once oblivious. But, after all, I am glad to be back; glad to be in the current of real life again, and to take my share in it. It is worth something to live in a land where one does not have to despise the men or pity the women; where a man is not ashamed to be seen carrying his own baby; where a girl can walk the streets alone and unmolested, and where a lady can earn her daily bread and be thought a lady still.

I have a quiet home with my mother’s cousin—“auntie,” I call her; and I have settled down to steady work with a concert or play or toboggan party to give it a little zest now and then. My classes take me to Dorchester and Cambridge and Longwood. Once a week I meet a score or so of our Boston society women in a Commonwealth Avenue drawing-room, who manage, among their thousand and one lectures, lessons, and engagements of every sort, to squeeze in an hour to hear me discourse on the topics of the day, when I try to teach them about some phases of our nineteenth century life of which they, like most women, know but little. As these ladies include all shades of religious and political belief and non-belief, I have to choose my words, as you may imagine.

I write a little occasionally for the “Transcript” or “Woman’s Journal,” or some other equally inoffensive and unremunerative sheet. I visit my North Enders, and think I am doing God more service in trying to keep some of my small Hibernians from being sent to the Reform School than I ever used to accomplish in teaching Jewish history at the Mission.