I have not said anything to him about it yet.

                                   Yours
                                             S. L. C.

It was to be a complete breaking up of their beautiful establishment.  Patrick McAleer, George the butler, and others of their household help had been like members of the family.  We may guess at the heartbreak of it all, even though the letters remain cheerful.

Howells, strangely enough, seems to have been about the last one to be told of their European plans; in fact, he first got wind of it from the papers, and wrote for information.  Likely enough Clemens had not until then had the courage to confess.

To W. D. Howells, in Boston: 

Hartford, May 20, ’91.  Dear Howells,—­For her health’s sake Mrs. Clemens must try baths somewhere, and this it is that has determined us to go to Europe.  The water required seems to be provided at a little obscure and little-visited nook up in the hills back of the Rhine somewhere and you get to it by Rhine traffic-boat and country stage-coach.  Come, get “sick or sorry enough” and join us.  We shall be a little while at that bath, and the rest of the summer at Annecy (this confidential to you) in Haute Savoie, 22 miles from Geneva.  Spend the winters in Berlin.  I don’t know how long we shall be in Europe—­I have a vote, but I don’t cast it.  I’m going to do whatever the others desire, with leave to change their mind, without prejudice, whenever they want to.  Travel has no longer, any charm for me.  I have seen all the foreign countries I want to see except heaven and hell, and I have only a vague curiosity as concerns one of those.

I found I couldn’t use the play—­I had departed too far from its lines when I came to look at it.  I thought I might get a great deal of dialogue out of it, but I got only 15 loosely written pages—­they saved me half a days work.  It was the cursing phonograph.  There was abundance of good dialogue, but it couldn’t befitted into the new conditions of the story.

Oh, look here—­I did to-day what I have several times in past years thought of doing:  answered an interviewing proposition from a rich newspaper with the reminder that they had not stated the terms; that my time was all occupied with writing, at good pay, and that as talking was harder work I should not care to venture it unless I knew the pay was going to be proportionately higher.  I wish I had thought of this the other day when Charley Stoddard turned a pleasant Englishman loose on me and I couldn’t think of any rational excuse. 
                                        Ys Ever
          
                                        mark.