Dear Grace and Grandma: It being the birthday of our country’s father and a legal holiday, I’m not obliged to be at the office. But it doesn’t mean that I haven’t been mightily busy. In fact, for the last three days I have been working very hard to finish up a series of poems for my book (if the printer ever gets around to take it seriously) and they are about done. There are two more to be finished--and then I’ll feel better, even if the book is a year in getting printed. You know one makes up one’s mind that certain things go well together--make a book, in fact--and you don’t feel satisfied until you have brought all the pieces to a uniform standard of excellence. I have revised a good many poems, and had to complete others that were half finished, and it all takes a great deal of work. This sounds as though there were going to be a great number of poems in the book, which, however, isn’t exactly so. But the book will at least afford me some credit in the world, if not at once, at least later on. --/--/ 200: TO CHARLOTTE AND RICHARD RYCHTARIK [_Brooklyn_] _Feb. 28th, ’25_ Dear Lotte and Ricardo: My grandmother sent me a picture of the artist before the Public Hall garden model, clipped from the paper--and as tonight is the night the beds were announced as being supposed to first bloom, I think of you as walking in a perfect Venusberg of flowers and shrubbery. Alas for me! I have only one white hyacinth in my window and a bad breath from last night and luncheon today. But, for once, I was able to retire to my room--away from friends and “enemies” and spend a quiet and economical Saturday evening. I owe enough answers to letters to keep me in a week, but I know well enough that tomorrow night will find me in a Spanish restaurant near here, recently discovered, which serves the finest ruby-colored and rose-scented wine in N.Y. besides delicious smoky tasting sardines and hidalgoesque chicken. Waldo Frank knows Spanish very well, and was able to convince the management, thereby, that we were not revenue officers. Since then life even in “my” retired neighborhood in Brooklyn has been gay. I know you think me terrible, and given over entirely to pleasure and sin and folly. Certainly I am concerned a great deal with all three of these--and even so, don’t get _all_ I want. What worries me is that I’m so restricted in other ways besides. Even, yea, on the holiest impulses. For didn’t I promise to take Richard’s drawings or rather photos around to _The Dial_--and haven’t I, so far, completely failed to make a move? Really, I ought to sob in your laps for forgiveness. But to save your patience, I won’t even mention excuses. I’ll only mention that the matter has been frequently on my mind and that I’ll try to do something about it very soon. I’ll also try to get back to you somehow without damage to the drawings (originals, etc.) which I’ve kept so long.