October 22 Monday – In the a.m. at 21 Fifth Ave, N.Y. Sam wrote to Mary B. Rogers (Mrs. H.H. Rogers, Jr.).

I went Sabbath-breaking to Broughton’s, & beat him five games out of seven. Clara tried to stop me from going on such an errand, but I explained to her that . . . . . . She threatened to write you & ask if my explanation had any truth in it, but I said I wasn’t afraid, & dared her to go on. I said pals always stand by each other, right or wrong. That was to discourage her, & it may be sufficient. And it may not: there is no telling. However, there is no difficulty in the matter; if she ever brings it up, by speech or pen, all you need to do is to say that whatever I said was true. She will believe you, & that will put me all right & comfortable again.

The fact is, I have to lead a life of chicane & deception with this end of the family, although it is against my nature & principles; & whatever help you can afford me, most dearest pal, will be appreciated, & I will do as much for you whenever there is a chance.

(Indeed she did write you a letter & she gave it to me to read & mail, but it seemed to me safest to suppress it—except the part wherein she said “I was very sorry you did not come in, the day you brought my father home, & let us have the pleasure & privilege of knowing the ‘Mary’ he praises so much & so cordially.” Clara is a dear & lovable child, but troublesome. You will like her.)

Jean departs day after to-morrow. It will add to the already sufficient solitude of this house. She doesn’t go far, yet she will seem a whole light-year distant—if that isn’t too extravagant a figure to use in this connection.

I am enclosing a letter from a Catholic priest. I think it’s lovely. (But it’s only a bait—to fish a letter out of you; we throw away most letters, but Jean wants this one; & so, it’s like that pasementry gown that that charitable woman gave to the Californian sufferer & had to send for it again because it belonged to another person.)

Bedad I’m going to have the privilege of attending the wedding myself! I got the invitation in Dublin—& I took it for friendly & genuine, too, not merely artificial courtesy, for I liked Miss Kane, & I noticed that if she didn’t like me she didn’t say so. I had a Hartford engagement, of 30 years’ standing, for the 27 , but Miss Lyon undertook to get a postponement, & she has succeeded, & now I am free. October 27 , 30 years ago, 20 or 25 girls of 18 & 20 years old & thereabouts formed the Saturday Morning Club (essays & debates) & at their request I framed their rules of procedure & helped them organize. For these services they made me a member & I am a member yet—the only male one they have ever admitted. (But always when the debates began they turned me out.)

I shall see them again. How fresh & blooming & beautiful they were in that far-flown day!

Some are dead now, the others are grandmothers. We’ve got it postponed to November 3

Hang those two books, they are not unpacked yet—but they will be, before long. Harry will read one of them with interest, because it is history, & is authentic; & you are to burn the other without examination.

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Noon. It certainly is a vexatious world: after all this fuss & trouble & postponement it appears that I am not to get to the wedding at last, unless the impossible shall happen in my favor. But you will wish the pair prosperity & happiness for me, won’t you, Mariechen? / Affectionately your uncle Mark [MTP].

Isabel Lyon’s journal: Jean & I went out to look over Katonah today.

This morning the King had a beautiful letter from a Roman Catholic priest, saying that he had used a part of the 3rd installment of the autobiography as a text for his sermon. It was the part about Susy Clemens’s questions about eternity. The King cries out against the Church of Rome as a body, but its separate priests he has love & respect for—so his reply to this one was very beautiful.

Dear me, this morning a Miss Doty from No. 3 Fifth Avenue came in asking for an interview. She was not over pleased when the King declined to give it, or to let her use the stories she had heard him tell there. After she left I told the King some gossip I had heard—gossip going around ‘The Players’—about other quill drivers of No. 3 [Charlotte Teller Johnson’s address on Fifth Ave.]. Mr. Paine told me. [on separate sheet of paper] Oct. 22. The King repeated the gossip to the one gossiped about Oct. 23. I was summoned to her presence—but didn’t go.

Oct. 24. She came in & the incident is now closed—for it was all talked over. The King sent for me to have me give particulars. I gave what I dared [MTP]. Note: the information of Oct. 22 to 24 on the separate sheet involved the rumors about Clemens seeing “too much” of Charlotte Teller Johnson, who lived in a sort of artist commune around the corner at 3 Fifth Avenue. These notes are separate from the regular entries. And, from her Oct. 23 entry about this evening:

Last evening the King and C.C. went to see a first performance of “Cymbeline”. William Winter invited them to sit in his box for his son Jefferson Winter is playing part. I asked the King about it & he said that “Viola Allen was enchanting & as full of grace as a cat.” Winter was satisfying to look at too, because he was so very bad. G.G. [E.C.?] Stedman was in the box too, but the King cannot endure him, he thinks Stedman is an ass along certain lines. “He can be as bad as Gilder is at his worst, when Gilder tries to be witty.”

Hill writes: “The rumors concerned Clemens and Miss Teller, who remembered that,  Mr. Clemens, much agitated, told me he had heard people were gossiping about his seeing so much of me….When I insisted upon knowing just what the gossip was, he sent for his secretary, Miss Lyons, who said that someone at the Players’ Club had asked Mr. Paine (whom I never met,) who this Miss Teller was that Mark Twain was seeing so much of.

Clemens asked Miss Teller to move from the neighborhood, but she refused, pointing out that he was as old as her own grandmother; but Miss Lyon, who said she told her employer only “what I dared” of the gossip, might quite justifiably have felt that her meddling was improper. Perhaps she also reflected about what gossip might say regarding her own proximity to Clemens if it could vilify a woman who lived several houses away” [156].

Lystra writes: “Circumstantial evidence points to Lyon as the source of the rumors” [101]. Note: Lystra does not elaborate.