LONDON — January 1, 1909.
[DEAR MOTHER:]
I drank your health and Noll's and Charley's last night
and so we all came into the New Year together. I hope it will
be as good for me as the last. Certainly Chas. is coming on
well with another book. It is splendid. I am so very, very
glad. Some of the very best stories anybody has written will
be in his next book.
We dined at the Lewis's. There were 150 at dinner and as
we live in Chelsea now — one might as well be in Brooklyn — we
were a half hour late. Fancy feeling you were keeping 150
people hungry. I sat at Lady Lewis's table with some
interesting men and one beautiful woman all dressed in glass
over pink silk, and pearls, and pearls and then, pearls. She
said "Who am I" and I said "You look like a girl in America,
who used to stand under a green paper lamp shade up in a farm
house in New Hampshire and play
a violin." Whereat there was much applause, because it seemed
she was that girl, the daughter of a Mrs. Van S — — , who
wrote
short stories. Her daughter was L — — Van S — — now the
wife
of a baronet and worth five million dollars. The board we
paid then was eight dollars a week. Now, we are dining with
her next Monday and as I insisted on gold plate she said "Very
well, I'll get out the gold plate." But wasn't it dramatic of
me to remember her after twenty two years?
DICK.
