What a pity we can’t fix it! But Livy & I had the idea long ago & had to give it up. Do you remember a letter of mine, months ago, from the farm, that had ever so many lines marked out of it, this fashion:   ?

three lines of SLC’s typical looping cancellation mark

Well, that whole erasure was a proposition that Mollie, or you & Mollie together, make this German journey with Clara Spaulding & our tribe. Livy & I thought of it & talked of it & canvassed it all over, & arrived at the saddening & unwelcome conclusion that it wasn’t worth while to ask you to go, for you probably couldn’t get away: & if you could you would want to take Mollie around to see something, instead of shutting herself up in a remote German village for months at a time.—or even in a city. We had to give up the idea of asking Mollie to come without you, because that would lay upon us a too heavy responsibility. We thought of everything—even to the fact that 4 adults & a driver overstock a carriage, on the proposed morning & evening drives for recreation. We mightily wanted her along, but it was a plain case of dasn’t. ThusⒶemendation tumble to earth most of the pretty plans I get up.

And I perceive I am to be balked in all ways. Here we have been longing for a visit from Mollie all these months, & now that our chance is come, we cant take advantage of it for the reason that we are now to retire for a fortnight into the study & adjoining bedroom while workmen box up the furniture & carpeets of the rest of the house & put the place into the state of emptiness desolation meet for our two-years’ absence from it. Hang it all, I wish we could have had our little maid before this chaos came. It would have been a perfect delight to have her & that fortunate young fellow with us. And to lose Mollie’s pretty romance, told by her own lips, is the very hardest part of it. The planets are plainly not propitious. It makes me superstitiously afraid to go to sea.

Why do we go to Germany, do I hear you ask? Because the only chance I get here to work is the 3 months we spend at the farm in the summer. A nine months’ annual vacation is too burdensome. I want to find a German village where nobody knows my name or speaks any English, & shut myself up in a closet 2 miles from the hotel, & work every day without interruption until I shall have satisfied my consuming desire in that direction. Livy & the children & Miss Clara may learn the language, for occupation, with our nurse Rosa & some tutors for teachers.

O dear! don’t let Mollie marry till we come back. It wouldn’t be fair.