_Awepesha_, _Long Island_,
_March 21st._

You dear, to send us such a nice expensive cablegram! We found it
waiting when we arrived. Of course the name of the place limped out of
England hopelessly mutilated. But how could a British telegraph operator
be expected to spell Awepesha? The name is more American than the United
States, being Indian; and meaning "it calms." Belonging to Long Island,
it is Algonquian of course. Don't you think that rather a nice name for
a place on a shady shore by quiet waters, where fierce winds never blow,
and soft mists often make you look at the world as through an opal? It's
an appropriate name, too, because poor Cousin John Randolph Payton, who
died and left Awepesha to me, built it after separating from a Xantippe
wife who made his life a Nell.

Everything is sweet; and the large white house has the calmest face you
ever saw: wide-apart eyes, and a high, broad forehead, under drooping
green hair--elm hair. Jack loves it. He says I mustn't dream of selling,
as he rather thought it would be wise to do, before he saw my legacy.
Now his feeling is that even if we don't spend more than two months out
of twenty-four at the place, we simply _must_ keep it for ours. You
know we were married abroad, and this is Jack's first sight of anything
Colonial. When I used to talk about a house being "Colonial," it left
him cold. He had an idea that to the trained eye of a true Englishman
"Colonial" would mean debased Georgian. But now he admits--he's a
darling about admitting things, which I hear is a rare virtue in
husbands!--that there's a delicious uniqueness about an American
Colonial house not to be found anywhere or in anything else the world
over. It is, he thinks, as if America had spiritualized the Georgian era
and expressed it in terms of airy lightness unknown to the solid Georges
themselves. Of course, our home isn't _quite_ the real thing, but a
copy. It's forty years old, whereas Kidd's Pines--but oh, my dear, that
_reminds_ me! You'd never believe what has happened to that poor child,
Patricia Moore, whom I "starred" in my ship's letter to you. When I
wrote, she seemed on the topmost crest of the wave. "Poor" was the
_last_ adjective I should have selected to describe her position in
life.

Compared with her, _nothing_ has happened to Jack and me. All we've done
since I posted that letter on th