Ah dearest Mary still my handwriting must pursue you every day like IoGÇÖs gadfly on SocratesGÇÖ demon. It is school of course which on another sheet all to its horrid self. Now by the way as I have to write - a question. The trustees are going to repaint my whole deanery and please say what colour you would have - friend of Louis TiffanyGÇÖs wife and Lockwood de ForestGÇÖs sister what colour would you have? Dark grey and red, or green and black, or brown or what? The horrid painter is hungrily waiting and Mamie is not here, so you must say. Here is a postal. I may not take your advice but I wish to have it to reject. Yes I meant Keats of course. I had just been correcting five Shelley papers and I suppose what the mind was full of the hand wrote. By the way that medicine of yours (I am not yet from under its effect) may have been in part to blame. I wonder if you mixed magic in it in the night, or was it because we spoke of anything so distracting as Wagner, but my mind has shown a great tendency to recoil from my examination papers (Do you wonder, 50 pens telling the story of As You Like It - it will take all Mary AndersonGÇÖs slimness of pageGÇÖs legs to reconcile me to seeing it ever again) and revert to the Montebello drawing room. Let me tell me that pretty as is your new mantil [sic] hanging I like the old better and wish it copied. The new does not reproduce so well in visionary house-decoration. Mary is that Number 7 Washington Square North? I will mail the books on Saturday so let me know if you do not get off. I was counting up the weeks in reference to my Keats Wordsworth causes and do you know there are only 13 and that if we were to meet every two weeks that would only be 6 talks before I sail. You see how my draft twists the most professional occupations awry. Well if your vocations and avocations especially your operas permit would it not be fun for you to stop over one evening en route next Friday or Saturday week[?] I would meet you in Philadelphia so it would really be no more journey at all for we would talk about and in on the trains. Do not say no - only remember that if you should be going home at the end of the week there would be one of our six talks attained. I like GÇ£my dear CareyGÇ¥ so little that it makes me waver. Do you not think we might use Minnie in private; Carey looks perfectly salvage [sic], as you say strange. Why has no one come in for the past 20 minutes it is my afternoon and this talk to you has been five gain - for me. So Tilly is engaged. Mamie and I said she would stay abroad till that happened and she is to live in Paris always I suppose. My genius Miss Gould comes to dinner. If I had known Mamie was not to be here I doubt I should have ventured on a tete a tete. Yours
