After her stay in Bulgaria, Nelka return to Paris to finish her studies before returning to America.
Paris 1901.
"Oh how stimulating this place is and how much study and achievement there is. What a lecture I heard. It was more helpful to me than anything I can remember for a long while. And what a book I have got! A complete resignation without losing energy on one's work at hand that is what one may strive for. Energy and conviction and élan are not usually resigned to all obstacles and resignation is often lassitude. I feel resignation so necessary and at the same time I have such infinite faith in the power of 'il faut' (one must). The worst thing I am afraid of is to become tired in the way I mean. I think it is more hopeless than disgust and disillusion."
Paris 1900.
"Where can I read something holding your point of view which would be more within my range of understanding than Hegel? I can't understand free will as independent of our physical being and I don't see how will can be something different from a kind of complicated reflex. I am afraid there is no help for it. I will have to inform myself somehow. Anyway my head always seems clearer over here. I wish I could be so in America. You would not believe how waked up I can get. I believe it is in the air. There is something both stimulating and relaxing in the moral atmosphere that I feel only here."
After her stay in Paris and Bulgaria, Nelka returned to America and stayed either with her aunt Miss Blow or with her aunt Mrs. Wadsworth: in the summer in Cazenovia or Ashantee, in winter in Washington where her Aunt Martha had a large house which had just been built and occupied for the first time in 1900. Her aunt kept up a very active social life and while Nelka stayed through all this social activity she never liked it. She kept in close contact with the varied European embassies and especially the Russian embassy, where she enjoyed the influence of the European atmosphere.
Ashantee, November 1901.
"I do not want to complicate the interpretations of my condition and I want above all things to cease dwelling so selfishly upon it. There is no need of looking for unaccountable voids, longings and the like. I have been unhappy and shattered ever since Mama died. My own nature gives me much to contend with and I want to get away from it all. I am unfit for anything but concentration, and I am not made for the world I live in. If I am not married by the time I am twenty-seven, I am determined to go into a convent or our Red Cross. I may change my mind many times but this is my last word for the present. I have a contempt, when not pity, for the lives of most of the people I see around me and mine is among the most selfish and aimless. I do not wish to read or think or study. And as for 'consciously living for a true world view,' I want to run away from every form of consciousness."
Ashantee 1901.
"You speak in your letter of forming an unconscious totality of feeling and tendency out of their necessarily limited experiences, and of not living independently of the deposit of human struggle and thump. Certainly one should perhaps profit by the last but I cannot imagine acquiring anything: conviction, principle, or any attitude of mind except by simple experience. I think we may experience in an ordinary life all that is necessary to build a sufficient and adequate world view. And what I read means nothing to me except where I can compare it with my own experience or consider it in relation to my own experience. I do not think that I can have a proper world view until I am old enough to have had time to experience life and I don't want to go ahead of my experience in reading."