Do you wish to do something, Daddy, that will ensure your eternal
salvation? There is a family here who are in awfully desperate
straits. A mother and father and four visible children--the two older
boys have disappeared into the world to make their fortune and have not
sent any of it back. The father worked in a glass factory and got
consumption--it's awfully unhealthy work--and now has been sent away to
a hospital. That took all their savings, and the support of the family
falls upon the oldest daughter, who is twenty-four. She dressmakes for
$1.50 a day (when she can get it) and embroiders centrepieces in the
evening. The mother isn't very strong and is extremely ineffectual and
pious. She sits with her hands folded, a picture of patient
resignation, while the daughter kills herself with overwork and
responsibility and worry; she doesn't see how they are going to get
through the rest of the winter--and I don't either. One hundred
dollars would buy some coal and some shoes for three children so that
they could go to school, and give a little margin so that she needn't
worry herself to death when a few days pass and she doesn't get work.
You are the richest man I know. Don't you suppose you could spare one
hundred dollars? That girl deserves help a lot more than I ever did.
I wouldn't ask it except for the girl; I don't care much what happens
to the mother--she is such a jelly-fish.
The way people are for ever rolling their eyes to heaven and saying,
'Perhaps it's all for the best,' when they are perfectly dead sure it's
not, makes me enraged. Humility or resignation or whatever you choose
to call it, is simply impotent inertia. I'm for a more militant
religion!
We are getting the most dreadful lessons in philosophy--all of
Schopenhauer for tomorrow. The professor doesn't seem to realize that
we are taking any other subject. He's a queer old duck; he goes about
with his head in the clouds and blinks dazedly when occasionally he
strikes solid earth. He tries to lighten his lectures with an
occasional witticism--and we do our best to smile, but I assure you his
jokes are no laughing matter. He spends his entire time between
classes in trying to figure out whether matter really exists or whether
he only thinks it exists.
I'm sure my sewing girl hasn't any doubt but that it exists!
Where do you think my new novel is? In the waste-basket. I can see
myself that it's no good on earth, and when a loving author realizes
that, what WOULD be the judgment of a critical public?