Woodrow Wilson to Mary Allen Hulbert Peck

Your illness has filled me with the deepest anxiety and distress. You know so well how to make light of anything that affects yourself, and how to lead my thoughts away frogm it by all sorts of reassurances, that I fear I do not yet know just how serious your condition was or how far you have come out of danger. But I shall take heart and believe, from the mere fact that the nurse is about to leave you, if from nothing else, that you are really getting well. Pray, pray be careful. Your first note about the illness touched me to the quick, where you speak of the fear you had that you might go away without good-byes said! A pang went to my heart that made me realize just what it would have meant to me. So you must not! You must take care of yourself for Allen’s sake, and for ours, if not for your own. Your friend in Washington is carrying a great burden just now, and cannot afford to part with any portion of the strength and happiness he gets from the affection and sympathy and loyal faith of his closest friends, who understand, who know what is true and what is false of what they read about him in the papers, and who send him messages of the sort that keep this courage alive and his heart quick with life. Is that a selfish view to take of it? How better could I speak my own affection? How better could I say what your friendship and the consciousness of your sympathy means to me, from day to day, in the midst of distracting tasks as well as when I can invite my sould to a little pleasure and vacation from strain? Let me know again, please, by your own or some other hand, how you fare, - whether your improvement continues and your strength is confirmted. I shall be anxious until I hear again in confirmation of what you are thoughtful enough to tell me in the little note received to-day.

How I should like to refresh you, and myself, by talking over with you the news of the day. It is not all serious. It has its amusing and gossipy side, and it would not be altogether dull to rehearse it in detail. In much of it our contemporaries are certainly to be seen in their actual habit as they live, without concealment most when they deem their motives most covered and best Dressed. Our friend Huerta is a diverting brute! He is always so perfectly in character: so false, so sly, so full of bravado (the bravado of ignorance, chiefly), and yet so courageous, too, and determined, - such a mixture of weak and strong, of ridiculous and respectable! One moment you long for his blood, out of mere justice for what he has done, and the next you find yourself entertaining a sneaking admiration for hsis nerve. He will not let go till he pulls the whole house down with him. He loves only those who advise him to do what he wants to do. He has cold lead for those who tell him the truth. He is seldom sober and always impossible, and yet what an indomitable fighter for his own hand! Every day the news from Mexico City unsettles the news of the day before. The whole thing is quicksilver. I dare not finish my message to Congress intended for Tuesday till Tuesday’s news comes., Here for fear the things I say in it might turn out to be untrue in fact! Any hour of the day or night I may have to revise my judgment as to what it is best to do. Do you wonder that I have lost flesh a bit?And yes, to speak truth, I am quite well. I rejoice to find myself a very touogh customer. I do not see how anybody not tough in every fibre, both physical and mental, could ever survive the presidency of the United States, if he took the duties of the office seriously and really tried to discharge them as they ought to be discharged.

I am having a little (most unexpected) holiday to-day. Mrs. Wilson and Nellie, most unexpectedly and without permission., ran away from Cornish on Thursday and came down to see me. You may imagine how overjoyed I was to see them; and yet it makes me uneasy to have them here in this debilitating atmosphere (I refer to the literal atmosphere). It is beyond measure refreshing to see them and unbosom myself to them, after being pent up for the better part of a month for lack of such confidantes and yet I feel guilty about acquiescing in this sacrifice on their part. Not that they consider it such, bless their hearts.

We all unite in affectionate messages and in the joint adjuration and command to take care of yourself.