January 5 Tuesday – At the Villa Reale di Quarto near Florence Sam wrote to Frederick A. Duneka.
I have finished the “Italian With Grammar,” & have cut it down a good deal. I believe it will now split in two in the middle conveniently & go into 2 numbers of the Weekly without taking up too much room. Jean will typewrite it soon, & send it along.
A day or two ago I wrote an article entitled “Sold to Satan,” & have revised it & re-revised it to-day. I will forward it soon. It ought to get into the April Monthly, perhaps—thus early because the basis of it is hell & radium, & these interests are not permanent. I think it will bear illustrating with about one colored picture.
Jean has not typed the Midsummer story & the Xmas story yet, but I’m in hopes.
When you want anything more, let me know, & I will take hold & furnish it if I can. There is one thing I could do a chapter on—“English With a Foreign Grammar”—but I think of nothing else in the way of short literature at present.
Meantime I believe I will dig out one of my unfinished novels & finish it—a couple of them. Not for issue as single books, & not serially, but only to be added to the Complete Subscription Set [MTP].
Sam also wrote to Hélène Elisabeth Picard.
Dear France: / We have been in residence now nearly two months & are beginning to feel in some sort at home. The location suits me better than it suits the daughters, for it is a long journey to town, & they have to make it every day to take lessons & return visits, whereas about once a fortnight is as often as I have to stir beyond the gate. They do my return-visiting for me.
This is a sour day, & Florence & the Valley are half obliterated in a blue gloom, & I have grown moody with looking at it, & dull with writing magazine-stuff in bed all day; but now I will get up—it seems to be time. Therefore—avanti!
I do not quite know what it means, but they all say it, & it seems to be a good word & friendly [MTP: “Mark Twain’s Private Girls’ Club,” Ladies’ Home Journal, Feb. 1912, p.54].
Meille & Meille wrote from The Literary Office, Florence, to Sam, that a stenographer could not be found, but they recommended “a good and rapid typist,” Miss Newman, who could bring her own machine [MTP].