Woodrow Wilson to Mary Allen Hulbert Peck

Your letter, scribbled with pencil from your bed, reassured me and made me feel so much more at ease in my mind about you. I need not tell you how deeply distressed I was about the accident. I hope that you have a really competent doctor and can be sure that the fall resulted in nothing worse than painful strains and bruises. If that is really all that came of it, you may get as much rest as suffering out of it, and your friends can only implore you to be more careful. You certainly make a most entertaining and attractive patient. Your account contains delightful evidence of that, all “unbeknownst” to yourself. You scribbled more of a picture, more of a self–portraiture, than you knew. What made me say that the letter reassured me was that it showed the strain on your spirits which had made me so anxious since your experience in Bermuda to be at last relaxing. You wrote so much more like your old self. You spoke with so much more confidence of Allen. You showed that all your old, naive interest in the people about you was reviving, —your natural affection and sense of comradeship for them. There was something in the sentences that made me feel the old delightful, happy, irresponsible swing from one interesting thing to another in your thought, many of the things wholly irrelevant, apparently, if one had not see intimately into your mind and did not know its delectable way of going a journey of fancy. It was more like the letters you used to write and more like the free mind I used to enjoy so much in Bermuda: a mind ready for many things and with a zest in many adventures. By the way, speaking of Bermuda, I have been deeply interested in what the papers have had to say in recent weeks about the plans of the British government to make Bermuda an important naval station again, in view of its being on the road to the canal. Maybe Admiralty House will open its doors again and something of the old glory return to the little islands. That would be fine. I should like to see it come about. It would be a very natural change of policy in view of the way in which the trade and passenger routes of the world are sure to shift. There must be a general looking up of the “first families” down there, if the streams from the imperial treasury are likely to be turned that way again. The chief beneficiaries, however, will be the American visitors who will soon convince the British officials down there that all this is being done for their entertainment, to supply their daughters with dancing partners and make a “season” when things have fallen dull in The States, — particularly, to make a season for those for whom there is no season, or for whom seasons have been used up, in America. Must they do it all for us? But I ought not to indulge in such uncharitable reflections on Sunday, after I have been to church in a dear old–fashioned church such as I used to go to when I was a boy, amidst a congregation of simple and genuine people to whom it is a matter of utter indifference whether there is a season or not, either in New York (or Washington) or Bermuda, or anywhere else between the ends of the earth. On Sundays only my faithful aide and companion, Dr. Grayson, is with me. Tumulty has sent his little family to the seashore, at Avon, near Sea Girt, on the Jersey coast, and skips off every Friday, lucky dog! to spend the week end with them. I do not get out of bed on Sundays until about ten o’clock, just in time to get a little breakfast and get to church; and after my letters are written in the afternoon the doctor and I go off for a little drive in the motor, —unless, as this afternoon, a thunder storm comes up out of mere exasperation that there should have been so sultry a day. It seems to come up after such a day exactly as if in a bad humour, to drive the maddening airs away, chasing them with its great angry breath and growling the while like a wild beast in the chase. The Sunday afternoon letter writing gives me a delightful renewal of the normal thoughts and feelings that belong to me, not as President trying to handle an impossible president of Mexico, but as a friend and home–loving companion, who is never so deeply content as when talking to those whom I love and respect, whom I understand and who understand me, — without explanations of any kind! I am perfectly well, calm in my mind and purposes, and thankful to the bottom of my heart that there are those to whom I can subscribe myself