October 12 Sunday – In Hartford Sam wrote to his sister, Pamela Moffett:

I am very much obliged for the copy of McEwan’s staving good & just eulogy of Sam [Moffett]. I shall mail it to Susy. The last time I saw her was a week ago on the platform at Bryn Mawr. Our train was moving slowly away, & she was drifting collegeward afoot, her figure blurred & dim in the rain & fog, & she was crying [MTP].

Note: The above gives credence to the idea that Sam and Livy stayed at Bryn Mawr about one week, not two, as some sources have it, and that they left together.

Sam also wrote that his mother was near death, according to Orion’s letter received this day. Sam increasingly saw death as a blessed release from the pains of life; moreover, that his mother had lived too long.

What a pity, & how unfair, that she has been detained all these useless & distressing years. I think her sufferings must have been away beyond our conception — for in fancy she has constantly seen her sister snubbed, insulted, and wantonly misused [MTP].

‡ See Addenda.

Blakely Hall wrote an editorial sympathetic to Sam in the Brooklyn Eagle, p.3. Hall ridiculed Edward H. House, writing he “would never have produced his dramatization if it had not been for Frohman’s success.”

I should like to see Mr. House. Any man who can make a living by drawing a royalty from a piece which he not only never wrote, but with which he has had no connection whatever, and who can draw valuable royalties from that play under the sanction of the courts, is a man who may be described as soaring toward the heights of exalted financial genius. [Note: The court granted Frohman an injunction stopping House’s competing production of P&P.]

Ernest W. Smith for Revue des Revues, Paris wrote to ask Sam’s opinion on “the 40 best authors of works of fiction” [MTP].

Dorothy Tennant Stanley (Mrs. Henry M. Stanley) wrote to Sam accepting his invitation to stay with them, but mentioned she would have her mother, Mrs. Tennant along. “Because you speak of the ‘jungles of Hartford’ and as there is perhaps no hotel in that wild place, I should not like to leave my mother to go on alone to some neighboring town” [MTP].