SundayMargaret dear:
There are some bright orange colored poppies on my little table making sunshine this dull day. But they are so exactly your color, [...] the color for your room, they make me lonesome. I try to look in on you but the eyes of the spirit cannot even tell whether you are escaping the germs or not.
The epidemic is now so bad here that I feel a criminal for occupying hospital space. My own surgeon took to his bed after he finished with us Wednesday and I have not seen him since. And the poor little nurses look so duress. I feed them candy and grapes as I can, but they hardly have time for a bite. - If the doctors will let me I shall go tomorrow though at the present minute I know not where. But mother is going to look about today. - do you know that your friend's Lodge advertises [...] 22.00 a week and upward?
I feel a bit discouraged today though it is rather feeble-minded. Of course we should not ask for any kind of certainity [sic] in this uncertain world, but I had thought that surgery at least had a certain definiteness. But apparently there are two schools of thoughts on the subject of breast operations and the Boston doctors belonged to one, and these to another. On the whole these seem more reasonable but in childish moments it seems as if it would have been easier to have had the complete operation rather than that horrid incision and this waiting around for the Harvard report. I get the logic of it, of course, but not much else.
Well while I have been writing thus foolishly, the sunshine has been shyly coming out. Beautiful golden world - how silly to growl at it. I am sorry.
Dr. Tracy tells me Smith has closed. I wonder how it goes with you? Everyone at Wellesley was against closing when I left but I should not be surprised if they did. In that case I should be just low-minded enough to sigh over an excellent sum I paid Hope for coming on! -
Give Bertha my love and thanks for the dear letters. It will be a last straw if I don't manage a glimpse of you two, but we mustn't count on it, dear, not too much. - If the doctors don't do any more to me here, a week in the country around here would be enough to set me up - and it would be best for me to get to work quickly. Aside from the possibility of being a bother to already overburdened folk, there is a real question too, isn't there, about the quarantine? We shall have to turn our eyes to the war news - and to the days ahead when epidemics and operations are things of the past. Surely some good days are coming sometime.
With my dear dear love
Laura