uman species. Everything,
everything so beautiful except humanity--and not only man
himself--dirty and unenchanting--but the instrument of hideousness
all around."

Again Nelka was showing the restlessness because of the attachments
to the two sides of the ocean--Russia and America--and the
impossibility to satisfy entirely one or the other, or both. From
Russia she wrote:

St. Petersburg 1911.

"I wish I could be in America and eliminate from my personal horizon
the people and things which make me boil over in spite of myself.
Dear Poodie, I wish you could really know what I feel and mean. I
think if in recent years you had been in contact with the peace and
simplicity of Europe in general, you would see what makes me shrivel
with most Americans, because I am not above and beyond it as you are.
America may stand for freedom, but it has an unimancipated soul and
there is a perpetual affectation, a caution, a suspicion, a lack of
independence that does simply petrify life and crush feeling. You may
say it is a small world, I don't know, but it is everywhere I meet."

St. Petersburg 1911.

"I have at last decided that my life must remain unsettled,
undecided; it is too late to settle it except by sheer will, and that
is too stupid. Real ties exist in different centers--one must obey
both; it is utterly indifferent to me what external aspect my life
takes, because it is also too late."

(She was then 32 years old)

St. Petersburg 1911.

"I hope to be in America at intervals and often. You and Pats are
more to me than anything else and I have the greatest love for
Poodihaven (Cazenovia), but I cannot associate with outsiders
sufficiently to fill my life. I want to beat them all and I don't
want to hear them talk."

At this time, I think, she was going through a very difficult period
of uncertainty in her life, which is reflected in her letters written
at that time:

"If I did not care for Americans and if I did not have a great deal
of sentiment and associations, ties and memories in America, it would
be so easy to leave it alone and not think about it. But I know I am
both. I know how strongly attached I am to both sides and I only
deplore the difference among people in the world. But when I think of
even those others that I care for, I know that we are strangers. My
heart does not beat with any puritanical sentiment--so there. If I
am attracted to some puritanical offspring--some representative of
the prog