About the last time I saw you I described to you the culminating disaster in a book I was going to write (and will yet, when the stroke is further away)—­a man’s dead daughter brought to him when he had been through all other possible misfortunes—­and I said it couldn’t be done as it ought to be done except by a man who had lived it—­it must be written with the blood out of a man’s heart.  I couldn’t know, then, how soon I was to be made competent.  I have thought of it many a time since.  If you were here I think we could cry down each other’s necks, as in your dream.  For we are a pair of old derelicts drifting around, now, with some of our passengers gone and the sunniness of the others in eclipse.

I couldn’t get along without work now.  I bury myself in it up to the ears.  Long hours—­8 and 9 on a stretch, sometimes.  And all the days, Sundays included.  It isn’t all for print, by any means, for much of it fails to suit me; 50,000 words of it in the past year.  It was because of the deadness which invaded me when Susy died.  But I have made a change lately—­into dramatic work—­and I find it absorbingly entertaining.  I don’t know that I can write a play that will play:  but no matter, I’ll write half a dozen that won’t, anyway.  Dear me, I didn’t know there was such fun in it.  I’ll write twenty that won’t play.  I get into immense spirits as soon as my day is fairly started.  Of course a good deal of this friskiness comes of my being in sight of land—­on the Webster & Co. debts, I mean. (Private.) We’ve lived close to the bone and saved every cent we could, and there’s no undisputed claim, now, that we can’t cash.  I have marked this “private” because it is for the friends who are attending to the matter for us in New York to reveal it when they want to and if they want to.  There are only two claims which I dispute and which I mean to look into personally before I pay them.  But they are small.  Both together they amount to only $12,500.  I hope you will never get the like of the load saddled onto you that was saddled onto me 3 years ago.  And yet there is such a solid pleasure in paying the things that I reckon maybe it is worth while to get into that kind of a hobble, after all.  Mrs. Clemens gets millions of delight out of it; and the children have never uttered one complaint about the scrimping, from the beginning.

We all send you and all of you our love. 
          
                                   Mark.

Howells wrote:  “I wish you could understand how unshaken you are, you old tower, in every way; your foundations are struck so deep that you will catch the sunshine of immortal years, and bask in the same light as Cervantes and Shakespeare.”

The Clemens apartments at the Metropole became a sort of social clearing-house of the Viennese art and literary life, much more like an embassy than the home of a mere literary man.  Celebrities in every walk of life, persons of