Jessie Woodrow Wilson Sayre to Alice Appenzeller

Your dear, dear letter, oh Alice, how glad I was to get it! You are a true and understanding friend and I must sit down and answer it at once, or rather talk back. I have been away, you see, and have just read your letter and laid it down this minute.
It has been exciting and upsetting. I see quite a problem ahead in trying to adjust oneself, if.... and in trying to work out some definite ways of being useful. A social whirl can't seem to me useful from any point of view just now. “Oiling the wheels of state” makes it sound a little better but I want to connect it very logically with results for the kingdom if I am to resign myself calmly to only teas and receptions. However I am sure that with perseverance it will all work out satisfactorily. Mother and I have just been down to Baltimore, where we were overwhelmed with attention. Baltimore people are peculiarly charming and hospitable, and one two days there might have been a week for the number of things they managed to crowd in. However I escaped one morning and had a beautiful time at college seeing a great many of the girls and the professors. One of my very good friends there sails for Foo Chow in two weeks and I had the doubtful pleasure of saying goodbye to her for five years. Of the eight members of the faculty of the school to which she is going, two are sick and three are on furlough so she has work ahead! I heard more rumors about Katherine Scranton's husband. I heard that Marion wrote that though she had not liked him at first she did like him now, and that he and Katherine are perfectly, blissfully happy. Marion's friends are hoping to get her over to their country soon, in the spring perhaps. She is in Switzerland now. I am sure that the stories about him have been much exaggerated. I am afraid Katherine's record of wobbliness in would make people apt to seize on anything and enlarge on it.
So you are all alone with your mother this year. Our family is more or less scattered too. Father might as well be a travelling man, we see so little of him. Now that Roosevelt is ill—wasn't it a shame—we will see more of him. That is the only good thing about the shooting.
We went up to New York to hear Father's last speech possibly, the first we have heard in this campaign, and it was such fun to hear the people shout. Then yesterday we heard Margaret sing at her little apartment in New York and that was also another triumph, because as Nell said Margaret's voice is evidently one of those family skeletons which is never mentioned, and the Princeton friends who heard her with us were amazed. It was such fun!I must close now. I hope the year will bring you the very best of all good things and blessings—and also bring us together again. Please remember me to your mother