Week ends in company as genial, unaffected and intelligent as that of our new friends proved were a rare experience. When the time came for a final break-up of the crowd in August of 1892—my first companions had already gone back to America—those left of us decided to take a farewell vacation together. The difficulty was to settle on a place. Here was something not on my schedule. We considered Etaples, Beuzeval-Houlgate, Belle-Île and finally at the last moment took tickets to Mont-Saint-Michel—a glorious spot; but after watching the tide come in for two successive days, after climbing to the top and descending to the bottom of the château, sitting out sunsets on the wall and eating omelettes at Madame Poulard’s until we were fed to the full we pushed on to Saint-Malo and exhausted it as quickly as we had Mont-Saint-Michel. As we listened bored to the orchestra in the square a poster on a wall suddenly caught our collective eyes. It told us to go to the Island of Jersey. With one accord we said “Let’s,” packed our bags and caught the steamer all within an hour. At Jersey we walked into lodgings: rooms, plenty of them; a salon looking on the sea; such sea fish and vegetables and fruit as only that island offers. We thought it was costing a fortune, but when the bill came—house, housekeeper, maid, and food such as we had not had for a year—it totaled just eighty cents apiece for a day. That vacation put a gay finish on my first year in Paris. I began the second in deep depression, for several good reasons. First, I had exhausted my reserve. I think I came back from my vacation with twenty francs in my pocket. All my American associates were gone or going soon. I had a new address, for Madame Bonnet had moved from the neighborhood of the Musée Cluny to the more somber neighborhood of the Panthéon and, hardest of all, I knew now that instead of one year more I must have at least two to finish my undertaking. The homesickness and hunger for my family had never been appeased. I had lived on their letters. If they did not come regularly I scolded and wailed; I begged for details of their daily life. My mother was an intimate letter writer, delightfully frank about her neighbors and about the family. She told who was at church, fretted because father spent so much time with his precious Sunday school class of girls, described every new frock, told what they had for Sunday dinner, announced the first green corn in the garden, the blossoming of her pet flowers—snowdrops and primulas and iris in the spring, roses in the summer, anemones in the fall, cactus in the winter. Occasionally she would apologize for her homely details, particularly after I had written a long guidebookish epistle home describing some ancient monument I had been visiting. How I must have bored them sometimes! But home details—“I live off them,” I told her. “You can’t tell me too much about your daily doings.”