Rollins brought suit against the estate for Borglum, but the claim was rejected. The widow declared that there was no written contract. Mrs. Frémont was much incensed and wrote Gutzon a very gossipy letter about the worth of widows who needed written contracts. In 1896 Borglum left California again, expecting to settle in England. His last act before leaving was to model a bust of his dear friend and patron Mrs. Frémont. A photograph of the bust is the frontispiece of Mrs. Phillip’s biography of Mrs. Frémont and is credited to “John Gutzon Borglum, 27 years old, painter and sculptor, recently returned from Spain, following his triumphs in the Paris salons of 1891 and 1892.” What Borglum thought of this credit he does not say. He was headed for a permanent berth in a foreign country, and for once he didn’t seem to be quite certain of where he was going. CHAPTER SIX _ENGLAND_ There are not many people alive in the United States today who remember “the panic of 1893” and the “hard times of ’94, ’95 and ’96,” but the histories point out briefly that they were with us. Depression had begun to spread in 1890. The banking house of Baring, badly entangled with Argentine investments, closed its doors. The British began to dump American securities. The gold reserve began to disappear. And, in general, that is how things went for five or six years. Nowhere in Gutzon’s record of the times is there much mention of panic or money shortage. This may be a good place to record that in London he did show some concern about dollars--what they were and how they were kept. One gathers, indirectly, that he liked to be working. That he really enjoyed the pleasure of others in the things that he painted or carved was fairly obvious. Against that, he knew all that was to be known about hunger. His movement to England at a time when living in California was beginning to look difficult may indicate that somebody was taking thought. Life in England appears to have been no complete idyll. Gutzon himself was quite happy. There was work for him to do and he had plenty of English friends, but one gathers that Mrs. Borglum found the exile a bit painful. In 1897 Jessie Frémont wrote this to him: If you come away or go away from London, I shall be sorry and disappointed in you. English people _demand_ stability. And there is to be no talk even of preference for any other place. The time will surely come when you can put your preferences into execution, but it does chill and turn away interest to have a vanishing prospect. Mrs. Borglum has too much sense and far too much affection for you not to see that this is for your true interest. You cannot re-cast a national mold and England is set to its “slow-and-sure,” sure being its complement to slow. I do not blame Mrs. Borglum’s American impatience, but “stay where the money is.”