I am quite disrupted. Family affairs and “fusses” have been my destruction since I was eight years old when my father and mother began to quarrel. That phase only ended recently, and the slightest disturbance now tends to recall with consummate force all the past and its horrid memories on pretext of the slightest derangement of equilibrium. As I write I am ensconced at my office. Everybody else is away, for it is Sunday. Yet, in forgetfulness someone was very kind in leaving a gallon of delicious sherry. I have already had two good glasses of it without permission. I shall probably have two more before I go to see Isadora Duncan this evening and go back to the uninteresting room at the hotel. For without my books around me and my pictures and my Victrola with its Ravel, Debussy, Strauss and Wagner records--I am desolate, I find. I have grown accustomed to an “ivory tower” sort of existence. I am succeeding very well in my advertising writing. Salary raised and promises of more and decent people to work with who enjoy Joyce, Cabell, Pater and the best things of life. Yet even so--Life is meagre with me. I am unsatisfied and left always begging for beauty. I am tied to the stake--a little more wastefully burnt every day of my life while all America is saying, “every day I am growing better and better in every way,” and Dr. Coué makes his millions! I am just enough filled with wine at the time of this letter to make confessions that will bore you. Yet, oddly enough, it is at such times that I feel most like writing you and H----. He is floating under the shades of bamboos up the rivers of China under the dragon stars. You and I are in offices--seeking the same things--but my gift of humor has left me today. --/--/ 122: TO GORHAM MUNSON [_Cleveland_] _Tuesday, Dec. 12th_