Molly dear:
The news that you and your mother are to sail in a few weeks threw me into the seventh heaven of happiness,—I am already on the seventh floor of a pension with not much more of an elevator than the tower of Babel had. Mamma and Papa brought me here and installed me and then shot off to Turkey, Papa like a comet and Mamma like the tail of one, to finish up the bridge that has kept them so busy for the last year.
This pension is kept by an American lady and is full of Americans. It is rather fun to be here for a while, but I am longing for the time to come when you will be with me and we can go apartment hunting, that is, if your mother still thinks it will be wiser for us to keep house and not try to board. Of course you will come here first and we can take our time about getting settled for the winter. Mrs. Pace, the landlady, (but you had better not call her that to her face, as she is very much the grande dame, with so much blue blood she finds it difficult to keep it to herself,) wants you to stay all winter with her and has many arguments against housekeeping, but I'll let her get them off herself to your mother.
She is looking forward with great interest to meeting dear Mrs. Brown, as it seems she knows intimately a cousin and old friend of hers, a certain Sally Bolling of Kentucky, who is now the Marquise d'Ochtè, a swell of the Faubourg St. Germain, with a chateau in Normandy, family ghost, devoted peasantry and what not. I fancy your mother has told you of her. It will be great fun to meet some of the nobility, I think.
I am enrolled at the Julien Academy for the winter and am going to put in some months of hard drawing before I jump into color. I work only in the morning and spend the afternoons looking at pictures. I am such a sober person pacing the long galleries of the Louvre studying the wonderful paintings that no one would dream I am the harum-scarum I really am. Papa gave me a very serious talking to about how to conduct myself in Paris and I find, as usual, his advice is excellent. His theory is that any grown woman can go anywhere she wants to alone in Paris, provided she has some business to attend to and attends to it.
Of course Mrs. Pace is merely a nominal chaperone for me until your mother comes. She really seldom sees me, and when she does she is so full of her own affairs that she hardly remembers I have any; and then when she recalls that she is supposed to be my chaperone, she feels called upon to tell me to do my hair differently, or she does not like my best hat, or something else equally out of her province. But I am not going to tell you any more about her, as you can judge for yourself when you see her.
I am sorry your brother, Kent, cannot carry out his plan of studying at the Beaux Arts, but maybe something will turn up and he can come after all. I might have known Aunt Clay would obstruct, all she had in her power, but thank goodness, her power is limited and your mother will finally get the full amount of money for her oil lands that Papa thought she should have. As for being in Paris without much money, it really is a grand place to be poor in; and one can have more fun here on a franc than in New York on a dollar.
Hug your darling mother for me, and tell Kent that I refuse to answer his letters unless he gets some thin paper to write on. I am tired of paying double extra postage on his bulky epistles.
Let me know in plenty of time when to expect you and your mother, so I can engage the room of Mrs. Pace and meet you at the station. I wish I could go to Antwerp to be there when you arrive or even meet you halfway in Brussels, but I must put the temptation from me and await you quietly in Paris. Good-by, my darling old Molly Brown,
Your own devoted, ever loving