Mexico -- Description and travel; United States -- Description and travel
Having deposited Dick in New York, and having had a second inoculation
for typhoid (preparatory for Mexico) and feeling quite ill, I returned
to Philadelphia on Tuesday. The place is becoming almost familiar to
me. It is not unlike an English old-world town, there are parts of it
that recall Winchester, or even remote bits of London. I have come to
work. When I was here last someone commissioned me to do her husband.
“If you can get him to sit for you,” she said. I have got him. It is
true he made every effort to evade me, to escape me, to postpone me.
But I was determined not to be beat, and I gave him no loophole. Dr.
Tait McKenzie has lent me his studio, and my victim comes there every
morning from 11 to 1. He says he hates it, and he arrives protesting
and resentful. But I like him, and we talk quite pleasantly all the
time without stopping. I think he resents it less than he imagines. He
has a good head, typically American.
When I get back in the afternoon to my friends in the Chilten Hills,
where I am staying, I work in the loggia, on the portrait of their
little daughter. She is the same age as my Margaret, and makes me feel
rather homesick. To-morrow I return to New York, my work completed.
SUNDAY, MAY 29, 1921. _New York._
Dick and I with Kenneth, caught an 11:30 train for Croton. We lunched
with Crystal Eastman and her husband, Walter Fuller, in a roadside
cottage surrounded by roses. It was real country and, luxuriantly
green, with the fresh immaturity of impending summer. In the orchard on
the steep grassy hill behind the house the children climbed a cherry
tree, and Dick brought me greenleafed branches hanging with ripe sweet
cherries. After lunch we walked up the road to see the view from the
top of the hill. There is a sort of Colony at Croton, and every other
house is inhabited by someone one knows, or who knows the other. All
work-worn journalists, artists and Bohemians generally, who come there
with their children for a rest. The houses have no gardens, the grass
grows long and the rose bushes are weed tangled. Now and then a bunch
of peonies survives. The cottages have almost an abandoned look, for
the town toilers are too weary to work in their gardens when they get
there. Towards the hill summit I noticed a wooden veranda’d cottage,
looking rather neglected and lonely, the ground sloped down to a stream
where some yellow and some purple iris bloomed amid the waste. On the
post box at the gate were inscribed the two names: Reed, Bryant, and
sure enough it was the summer cottage of Jack Reed and his wife. My
thoughts shot straight across to Moscow, and to the grave under the
Kremlin wall. At the top of the hill we lay down in the long grass
under the shadow of a giant tree, and felt like insects, with the
butter-cups so much higher than ourselves, and the tall seed grasses
like slender trees above our heads. Dick, who was unrestful, and
looking for work, built a wall of loose stones between us, “to separate
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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