While I have at frequently recurring periods thought of returning home during the past year and a half, my resolution did not crystallize until I began to feel the compelling necessity of a rest, bodily, mentally, and, I might say, morally. Hot and cold by turns, lonely, sleepless, tired and generally run down, I have not been able to look at things in their true proportion, and I must get away for awhile from the daily struggle, keeping up the mental and moral one, however. To this end I have practically cut out all amusement. Night after night I come home tired out, read a little, generally till lights are out at 10:30, and then to my disturbed sleep. Getting up early as to-day (7:00 to 7:30 being early for me) I either read, study, write as to-day, or work on my story which I started last August and of which I will write more later. This elimination of outside distractions is helping to strengthen me, helping me to look forward to a life of service without the necessity of foolish excitement, and the money I am saving by this closeness in everything except necessities I hope to enable me to go home, rest, think, exercise, and study calmly and sanely for a year, paying my mother a regular weekly amount; and I hope at the end of the year to have sufficiently found myself to go ahead on my work with more collected ideas as to what I want and what I should want, and all to the better interests of my mother, myself and the good of others with whom I may come in contact. By the middle of this year I hope to take the first step by returning home. =Havana, Sunday, March 17, 1912.= The 15th ushered in a new start, and the 16th was a very important day. On the 14th I had been thinking very intently about future plans and went very carefully over the ground of a possible college course. I picked up my Self Educators and looked into the various subjects for study, estimated the time I would have to spend on a college course; the financial difficulties, my mother’s need of my help, my temperament and pronounced predilection for certain things and as pronounced aversion for others, my nervousness and constant mental struggle; the result of all this was to confirm what I wrote on January 8, that I had about given up the idea. The only hope, or rather possibility I have in view now, is that I may take a course in certain special subjects--literature, drama, philosophy, logic and sociology, but I hate mathematics. I pick up a book of algebra with extreme distaste and, although my enthusiasm in New York caused me to study this subject fairly assiduously, I see it was a mistake. I have a distinct tendency and deep enthusiasm for literature, gradually awakening from my first boyish effusions at the age of 10, and it was a waste of time to neglect what I can excel in for the sake of a mistaken idea that a college education means so much.