g however that I shall
not undertake to stay away so long again; it is too long and one grows
out of things. But nothing I feel, will be so easy or so amusing as
Paris and I intend to get through with it soon and trot home to you by
the middle of August AT THE VERY LATEST. So, please write me a
deceitful letter and say you do not miss me at all and that my being so
near as Paris makes a great difference and that I am better out of the
way and if Chas goes to London I shall be near him in case he forgets
to put on his overshoes or involves us in a war with G. B. Now, mother
dear, do write me a cheerful letter and say that you do not mind
waiting until the middle of August for me and when I come back this
time I shall make a long stay with you at Marion and tell you lots of
things I have not written you and I shall not go away again for ever so
long and if I do go I shall only stay a little while. You have no idea
how interesting this rush across the continent has been. I started in
snow and through marshes covered with ice and long horned cattle and
now we are in such a beautiful clean green land with green fields and
green trees and flowering bushes which you can smell as the train goes
by. I now think that instead of being a cafe-chantant singer I should
rather be an Austrian baron and own a castle on a hill with a red
roofed village around it. I have spent almost all of the trip sitting
on the platform and enjoying the sight of the queer peasants and the
soldiers and old villages. Tonight I shall be in "Paris, France" as
Morton used to say and I shall get clean and put on my dress clothes
but whether I shall go see Yvette Guilbert or Rusticana again I do not
know. Perhaps I shall just paddle around the fountain in the Place de
la Concorde and make myself thoroughly at home. With a great deal of
love to Dad and Nora and Chas and all.

DICK.

At the time that Richard's first travel articles appeared some of his
critics took umbrage at the fact that he was evidently under the
delusion that he had discovered London, Gibraltar, Athens, Paris, and
the other cities he had visited, and that no one else had ever written
about them. As a matter of fact no one could have been more keenly
conscious of what an oft-told tale were the places that he had chosen
to describe. If Richard took it for granted that the reader was
totally unacquainted with the peoples of these cities and their ways,
it was because he believe