"How can you keep your faith in humanity? I think it is all so weak and not beautiful, and life as it goes somehow such an outrageous fizzle. Why are there such beautiful things, conceptions, possibilities only to be ruined by fatal microbes this human nature puts into it? Life only in yearning; Death to crown realization; peace only in oblivion. What for? And even the power of renounciation has to be fought for."
She was working at that time in the Kaufman community but was to go to Montenegro for a hospital reorganization. This did not come about. She wrote:
St. Petersburg 1911.
"I am undergoing the greatest disappointment at this moment. I was to be sent to Montenegro to establish a Red Cross sisterhood and overhaul the hospital, and to be given five sisters to take with me I as the head—so interesting—and in the part of the world which has always attracted me to the utmost, ever since I was in Sofia. And after it was all arranged and I was simply reveling in every detail, Baroness Ixkull decided that it was simply impossible to take Tibi."
St. Petersburg 1911.
"One doesn't love anything any more, religion, country, art. The only thing is to have one's interest outside of oneself—and to be very busy. I can hardly believe, at least I wonder, at myself being able to do so many things I dislike—getting up every day so early, no walks with Tibi, sleeping between five and six hours, often only four, and yet I enjoy everything—ice cream is a festival, a moment to sew a treat, and bed heaven."
"But oh, all these sick people—so depressing and gives one such an impression of superfluity of the human species. Everything, everything so beautiful except humanity—and not only man himself—dirty and unenchanting—but the instrument of hideousness all around."
Again Nelka was showing the restlessness because of the attachments to the two sides of the ocean—Russia and America—and the impossibility to satisfy entirely one or the other, or both. From Russia she wrote:
St. Petersburg 1911.
"I wish I could be in America and eliminate from my personal horizon the people and things which make me boil over in spite of myself. Dear Poodie, I wish you could really know what I feel and mean. I think if in recent years you had been in contact with the peace and simplicity of Europe in general, you would see what makes me shrivel with most Americans, because I am not above and beyond it as you are. America may stand for freedom, but it has an unimancipated soul and there is a perpetual affectation, a caution, a suspicion, a lack of independence that does simply petrify life and crush feeling. You may say it is a small world, I don't know, but it is everywhere I meet."