February 26 Wednesday – At 21 Fifth Ave. NY, Isabel Lyon telephoned Albert Bigelow Paine after discovering some missing older letters of Clemens’. Isabel Lyon’s diary:

Tino [a nickname for Paine] in Redding…to ask about letters that I am missing and that the King and Santa [Clara] would hold me responsible for. He was cross and answered in a burst of ill temper that he had many letters and would take them when he wanted to. This is not quite right of Tino—and is a new and regrettable attitude [Hill 201].

Note: Lyon was concerned that if Paine published the letters, the volume that she and Clara Clemens planned to publish might be injured. Hill adds that Paine wrote Isabel a letter claiming he had spent two years and over $8,000 working on Twain’s bio, and met her concern by saying that the brief excerpts he would publish would only serve to increase the public’s appetite for Clara’s later volume [201-2].

Jean Clemens wrote from Greenwich, Conn. to Isabel Lyon:

Howdy Lioness; / It’s raining cats & dogs wherefore my walk in (I started a word & then ran to give George 3 cts. & now I don’t know what the word was intended to be) had of necessity to be diminished.

Thank you so very much for those photographs, especially the one of “In the Garden” which I love. It brings out the wonderful details of the grasses, leaves & of the background so much better than the newspaper print. I hadn’t so much as seen the houses & terraces in the background, before. It is all so exquisite, so perfect.

And what do you suppose? Mr. [George de Forest] Brush actually wants to paint me. He means to endeavor to find a stray moment before he sails to draw a sketch of me to work on in Florence & then when he returns paint some things. And besides all this he told me that he and “Mittie” had sat about in Dublin admiring me. Are you as utterly amazed as I was? I had never dreamed of a thing, not an atom in Dublin. And when at Bedford I caught him staring somewhat hard, I thought he was looking to see whether I appeared well or not, as people had been peering at me on account of my health.  …

On Monday, I discussed Mildred most of the time with Dr. P. but when he asked me how I felt, I answered:

“Spry as a grasshopper” & that’s still true [MTP].