Poor dear girl, I know you are brave but I'd just like to hold your hand or look steadily into your eyes, to tell you that you have the best thing that this world gives--friends who are one with you. I can see old Adolph with his grimness and his great love, which makes him more grim and far more mandatory, what a sturdy old Dutch Calvinist he is! He really is more Dutch than German--Dutch modified by the California sun--and Calvinist sweetened by you and Boulder Creek, and Berkeley and William James and B. I. Wheeler and his Saint of a Mother. Well, let him pass, why should I talk of him when you really want me to talk of myself! Last night we had the GRIDIRON dinner, and the President made an exalted speech. He is spiritually great, Mary, and don't you dare smile and think of the widow! We are all dual, old Emerson said it in his ESSAY ON FREE WILL, and Adolph can tell you what old Greek said it. And this duality is where the fight comes in, and the two people walk side by side, to-day is Jekyll's day, and tomorrow is Hyde's, and so they alternate. Well, the GRIDIRON was a grind on Bryan and Villard and Ford, and a boost for preparedness and Garrison and the Army and Navy. Tell Adolph they had a Democratic mule, two men walking together under a cover, the head end reasonable, the hind end kicking--the front end of course represented the Wilson crowd and the hind end the Bryan-Kitchin,--and the two wouldn't work together. The whole thing was splendidly done and was a lesson to the few Democrats who were there--which they won't learn. Nancy went to her second party last night--a joyous thing in a new evening cloak of old rose, which made her feel that Cleopatra and the Queen of Sheba and Mrs. Galt and all other exalted ladies had nothing on her. What a glorious thing life would be if we could remain children, with all the simple joys and none of the horrors that age brings on. There is certainly a good fifty per cent chance that this fine spirit will marry some damn brute who will worry and harass the soul out of her. For so the world goes. I hope she'll be as fortunate as you have been. To-night we go to the Polks to see Mrs. Martin Egan who was on a torpedoed ship in the Mediterranean, and although she couldn't swim floated forty-five minutes till rescued. You must know the Polks well. She has very real charm and your old Mormon of a husband will desert his other fairies for her. Now I have gossiped and preached and prophesied and mourned and otherwise revealed what passes through a wandering mind in half an hour, so I send you, at the close of this screed, my blessing, which is a poor gift, and I would send you the parcel post limit of my love if it weren't for Anne and Adolph, who are narrow- minded Dutch Calvinists. May good fortune betide you and bring you back very soon to the many whose hearts are sympathetic. FRANK TO MRS. MAGNUS ANDERSEN Washington, D.C., December 24, [1915]