lara's room commands the finest; she keeps a window ten feet high wide
open all the time and frames it in. I go in from time to time, every day
and trade sass for a look. The central detail is a distant and stately
snow-hump that rises above and behind blackforested hills, and its
sloping vast buttresses, velvety and sun-polished with purple shadows
between, make the sort of picture we knew that time we walked in
Switzerland in the days of our youth.

I wish I could show your letter to Livy--but she must wait a week or so
for it. I think I told you she had a prostrating week of tonsillitis a
month ago; she has remained very feeble ever since, and confined to the
bed of course, but we allow ourselves to believe she will regain the
lost ground in another month. Her physician is Professor Grocco--she
could not have a better. And she has a very good trained nurse.

Love to all of you from all of us. And to all of our dear Hartford
friends.

MARK

P. S. 3 days later.

Livy is as remarkable as ever. The day I wrote you--that night, I
mean--she had a bitter attack of gout or rheumatism occupying the whole
left arm from shoulder to fingers, accompanied by fever. The pains
racked her 50 or 60 hours; they have departed, now--and already she is
planning a trip to Egypt next fall, and a winter's sojourn there! This
is life in her yet.

You will be surprised that I was willing to do so much
magazine-writing--a thing I have always been chary about--but I had good
reasons. Our expenses have been so prodigious for a year and a half,
and are still so prodigious, that Livy was worrying altogether too much
about them, and doing a very dangerous amount of lying awake on their
account. It was necessary to stop that, and it is now stopped.

Yes, she is remarkable, Joe. Her rheumatic attack set me to cursing and
swearing, without limit as to time or energy, but it merely concentrated
her patience and her unconquerable fortitude. It is the difference
between us. I can't count the different kinds of ailments which have
assaulted her in this fiendish year and a half--and I forgive none of
them--but here she comes up again as bright and fresh and enterprising
as ever, and goes to planning about Egypt, with a hope and a confidence
which are to me amazing.

Clara is calling for me--we have to go into town and pay calls.

MARK.

In Florence, that winter, Clemens began dictatin