[No surviving envelope]
This will be a short letter, but it will be the first that I have written since arriving on Friday afternoon. I have been to my office for a time yesterday and the day before, looked through the accumulated matter and dictated some simple business letters, and in the evening was fit for nothing but bed. The strain of the air passage is more on the spirit and mind than on the body – it was a smooth passage – and is largely due to the violence of the sudden change from one place to another. ThenPrinceton University;e2 those last three days, at Princeton and New Haven, were a kind of artificial stimulant, not giving pleasure but deadening pain, and of course the numbed nerves are now just beginning to wake and throb.1
TheAmericaPeterborough, New Hampshire;g4visited by EH;a1 last picture of you, framed in the doorway of Hubbard Street, is always in my mind. INoyes, Penelope Barker;e4 have been thinking of you also at Peterborough, wondering how you have been there, and whether you have found Penelope2 soothing or trying, andHale, Emilyas actor;v8in Kind Lady;d4 how you are beginning to live in to your role in that terrible play.3 My thoughts will follow you from place to place. Whether it brings you pain or comfort, or whether it means less than either, you have all my love and devotion always, and this I must tell you.
The letter that never reached you had been returned here by the Post Office: I had typed ‘Cambridge’ instead of ‘Concord’.
1.TSE gave EH a copy of Prufrock (1st edn.: Egoist Press, 1917): ‘Inscribed for Miss Emily Hale by T. S. Eliot / New Haven 26. v. 47.’
2.Penelope Noyes.
3.EH was to star in a Dorset Players production of Kind Lady (1933) – based on a short story by Hugh Walpole – by the American playwright and producer Edward Chodorov (1904–88).
12.PenelopeNoyes, Penelope Barker Barker Noyes (1891–1977), who was descended from settlers of the Plymouth Colony, lived in a historic colonial house (built in 1894 for her father James Atkins Noyes) at 1 Highland Street, Cambridge, MA. Unitarian. She was a close friend of EH.