The collapse of the “great hope” meant to the Clemens household that their struggle with debt was to continue, that their economies were to become more rigid.  In a letter on her wedding anniversary, February a (1895), Mrs. Clemens wrote to her sister: 

As I was starting down the stairs for my breakfast this morning Mr. Clemens called me back and took out a five-franc piece and gave it to me, saying:  “It is our silver-wedding day, and so I give you a present.”

It was a symbol of their reduced circumstances—­of the change that twenty-five years had brought.

Literary matters, however, prospered.  The new book progressed amazingly.  The worst had happened; other and distracting interests were dead.  He was deep in the third part-the story of Joan’s trial and condemnation, and he forgot most other things in his determination to make that one a reality.

As at Viviani, Clemens read his chapters to the family circle.  The story was drawing near the end now; tragedy was closing in on the frail martyr; the farce of her trial was wringing their hearts.  Susy would say, “Wait, wait till I get a handkerchief,” and one night when the last pages had been written and read, and Joan had made the supreme expiation for devotion to a paltry king, Susy wrote in her diary, “To-night Joan of Arc was burned at the stake,” meaning that the book was finished.

Susy herself had literary taste and might have written had it not been that she desired to sing.  There are fragments of her writing that show the true literary touch.  Her father, in an unpublished article which he once wrote of her, quoted a paragraph, doubtless intended some day to take its place at the end of a story: 

And now at last when they lie at rest they must go hence.  It is always so.  Completion; perfection, satisfaction attained—­a human life has fulfilled its earthly destiny.  Poor human life!  It may not pause and rest, for it must hasten on to other realms and greater consummations.

She was a deep reader, and she had that wonderful gift of brilliant, flowing, scintillating speech.  From her father she had inherited a rare faculty of oral expression, born of a superior depth of mind, swiftness and clearness of comprehension, combined with rapid, brilliant, and forceful phrasing.  Her father wrote of her gift: 

Sometimes in those days of swift development her speech was rocket- like for vividness and for the sense it carried of visibility.  I seem to see it stream into the sky and burst full in a shower of colored fire.

We are dwelling here a moment on Susy, for she was at her best that winter.