Woodrow Wilson to Mary Allen Hulbert Peck

It was a great delight to hear from you, but not that you were ill and had defied the doctor, with the usual result, that you had used up your vitality utterly and could only lie like an invalid and look out of the windows to forget the house you have just set in order and catch some refreshment from the sea and the hills. I know how especially hard it must have been to go back to Nantucket this time and handle all the things that dear Mrs. Allen laid away with those tireless faithful hands of hers and her sweet zeal to save you all the trouble possible! There must have been an all but intolerable ache at your heart! I wish that at this distance there were some way to govern and divert your thoughts, — or some hypnotism we could exercise over you to make you take care of yourself and seek only the things in that lively mind of yours that relieve the strain. If some one of us could only drop you a few lines every day, be your daily companions, and play to you as we would wish to, perhaps we could manage you. As it is, we can hardly manage ourselves! I think that when we get through with this extraordinary experience we are going through here we will hardly know what it is to have a life and a choice of our own, seek our friends as we please, and cultivate our own souls. It seems to grow more and more absorbing. I seem to have less and less time that I can call, even by courtesy, my own. Now it is the currency I have tackled. Not an hour can I let it out of my mind. Everybody must be seen: every right means be used to direct the thought and purpose of those who are to deal with it and of those who, outside of Washington, are to criticise it and form public opinion about it. It is not like the tariff, about which opinion has been definitely forming long years through. There are almost as many judgments as there are men. To form a single plan and a single intention about it seems at times a task so various and so elusive that it is hard to keep one's heart from failing. Fortunately my heard has formed no habit of failing. The last think I ever think of doing is giving up. But, among other things, this business means that I am to have no vacation. On Friday next I shall, if I can possibly run away, accompany the family up the to Cornish, staying, if Congress itself adjourns long enough, over the fourth of July. But then I come back for the long pull alone. I may be able to run up for a week end at long intervals (at any rate they will seem endlessly long!), but only if the way things are going make it wise and perfectly safe. I could not stand the additional anxiety of seeing this heat wilt my dear ones. I am not affected by it as Ellen is. I seem a thorough–going Southerner. I have never tried a summer here, of course, where summers are said to be especially fierce; but I have tried them further South and feel sure of myself. I may get cross (which would be a pity and a bit risky in the circumstances),but I shall not get ill. And that trip I had promised myself to Panama now seems only too likely to fade utterly away. My present guess is that Congress will not adjourn before the first of October. My hope is that I can at least systematize my pleasure as well as my business and get regular times off to play golf or to go cruising down the river on the craft that are happily at the disposal of the President for an occasional outing. And on Sundays I can sit down, may I not? for a chat with my friend at Nantucket, and we may gossip about the several forms of loneliness and the various prescriptions and forms of treatment we have heard of and tried. It will be amusing, if not helpful. And the jolly thing we have always found about one another is, that nothing is easier than for either one of us to see, upon the merest hint, how the other is affected by any particular circumstance or situation, to know what will be real remedies for real trains of thought and periods of anxiety. Think out things for me, please madam, and I will try to do the same for you, and we will carry on the jolliest and most profitable commerce in notions and rallyings and suggestions that can be imagined. Neither of us can then boast to the other how lonely he (or she) is. We sall simply address ourselves to the task of making it as bearable and as amusing for the other as possible. Is it a bargain?