March 7 Tuesday – At 21 Fifth Ave. in N.Y.C. Sam wrote to Beatrice M. Benjamin.
Thank you for remembering to send me the questions. At first glance they look formidable, for young girls (& their elders); but upon examination one finds them to be simple, direct, distinctly outlined, & not formidable—in a word, well devised, a difficult job competently performed. A definite question is a suggestive & stimulating text to talk to, a vague & indefinite one is an invitation to you to make snowballs out of fog—an industry which has its embarrassments.
Do you know, I trained the Young Girls’ Club, of Hartford (that is, the Monday Morning Club), in this very business 25 years ago—& I was a member, too. To this day I am the only young girl of my sex that has the privilege of belonging to that Club. You write & ask anybody there if it isn’t so.
Your parents are well. I saw them at your granther’s the other night. Good-bye, dear, it is time I was getting to work [MTP]. Note: Beatrice was the daughter of William Evarts Benjamin and Anne Engle Rogers Benjamin, H.H. Rogers’ oldest daughter.
Sam also wrote to Joe Twichell:
By George! But Mr. Wheaton does shovel the sackcloth & ashes onto your head in a most gentle & blistering way! I have not seen it better done in my life-days, as the Germans say. I think I divine how you feel, & about how much boot you would give to change places with almost anybody who has been caught in a disreputable performance—for instance, with that young friend of yours, courting his girl in her log home, & excused himself to go outside & “look after his horse.”
You must bring Mr. Wheaton here, some time when you are down, so that we can find out why he wants to stop war, which, to my mind, is one of the very best methods known to us of diminishing the human race. (What a life it is?? this one! Everything we do, somebody intrudes & obstructs it. After years of thought & labor, I have arrived within one little bit of a step of perfecting my invention for exhausting the oxygen in the globe’s air during a stretch of 22 minutes, & of course along comes an obstructor who is inventing something to protect life. Damn such a world, anyway.)
Send Dave bach!—that breeder of disappointments. / Lovingly, Mark [MTP: Cushman file]. Note: the Dave reference may be to Joe’s son, David.
Isabel Lyon’s journal: “Today Mrs. [Clara] Stanchfield dined here. She is ever so charming. We had interesting talk after dinner when it switched onto eternity, a thing that has been in my mind so much of late” [MTP: TS 43].
Philip Cabot (1872-1941) wrote for Henry Copley Greene to Sam. “As instructed by my clients, Mr. Henry Copley Greene and Miss Belle Greene, I enclose you herewith in duplicate leases of their house on Lone Tree Hill in the Town of Dublin, New Hampshire” Cabot invited Sam’s response if the leases were not drawn to his understanding [MTP].