after people for whom we cared nothing, and being chased by them.
My story isn't finished yet, and what part of it is done bears the
fatal marks of haste and distraction. Of course, I haven't put pen
to paper yet on the play. I wring my hands and beat my breast when
I think of how these weeks have been wasted; and how I have been
forced to waste them by the infernal social circumstances from which
I couldn't escape."

Clemens, now free from the burden of his own book, was light of
heart and full of ideas and news; also of sympathy and appreciation.
Howells's story of this time was "A Woman's Reason." Governor
Jewell, of this letter, was Marshall Jewell, Governor of Connecticut
from 1871 to 1873. Later, he was Minister to Russia, and in 1874
was United States Postmaster-General.

*****

To W. D. Howells, in Florence:

HARTFORD, March 1st, 1883.

MY DEAR HOWELLS,--We got ourselves ground up in that same mill, once,
in London, and another time in Paris. It is a kind of foretaste of hell.
There is no way to avoid it except by the method which you have now
chosen. One must live secretly and cut himself utterly off from the
human race, or life in Europe becomes an unbearable burden and work
an impossibility. I learned something last night, and maybe it may
reconcile me to go to Europe again sometime. I attended one of the
astonishingly popular lectures of a man by the name of Stoddard, who
exhibits interesting stereopticon pictures and then knocks the interest
all out of them with his comments upon them. But all the world go there
to look and listen, and are apparently well satisfied. And they ought to
be fully satisfied, if the lecturer would only keep still, or die in the
first act. But he described how retired tradesmen and farmers in Holland
load a lazy scow with the family and the household effects, and then
loaf along the waterways of the low countries all the summer long,
paying no visits, receiving none, and just lazying a heavenly life out
in their own private unpestered society, and doing their literary work,
if they have any, wholly uninterrupted. If you had hired such a boat and
sent for us we should have a couple of satisfactory books ready for
the press now with no marks of interruption, vexatious wearinesses, and
other hellishnesses visible upon them anywhere. We shall have to do this
another tim