fter her stay in Paris and Bulgaria, Nelka returned to America and
stayed either with her aunt Miss Blow or with her aunt Mrs.
Wadsworth: in the summer in Cazenovia or Ashantee, in winter in
Washington where her Aunt Martha had a large house which had just
been built and occupied for the first time in 1900. Her aunt kept up
a very active social life and while Nelka stayed through all this
social activity she never liked it. She kept in close contact with
the varied European embassies and especially the Russian embassy,
where she enjoyed the influence of the European atmosphere.

Ashantee, November 1901.

"I do not want to complicate the interpretations of my condition and
I want above all things to cease dwelling so selfishly upon it.
There is no need of looking for unaccountable voids, longings and the
like. I have been unhappy and shattered ever since Mama died. My
own nature gives me much to contend with and I want to get away from
it all. I am unfit for anything but concentration, and I am not made
for the world I live in. If I am not married by the time I am
twenty-seven, I am determined to go into a convent or our Red Cross.
I may change my mind many times but this is my last word for the
present. I have a contempt, when not pity, for the lives of most of
the people I see around me and mine is among the most selfish and
aimless. I do not wish to read or think or study. And as for
'consciously living for a true world view,' I want to run away from
every form of consciousness."

Ashantee 1901.

"You speak in your letter of forming an unconscious totality of
feeling and tendency out of their necessarily limited experiences,
and of not living independently of the deposit of human struggle and
thump. Certainly one should perhaps profit by the last but I cannot
imagine acquiring anything: conviction, principle, or any attitude of
mind except by simple experience. I think we may experience in an
ordinary life all that is necessary to build a sufficient and
adequate world view. And what I read means nothing to me except
where I can compare it with my own experience or consider it in
relation to my own experience. I do not think that I can have a
proper world view until I am old enough to have had time to
experience life and I don't want to go ahead of my experience in
reading."

Ashantee, November 1901.

"Kitty and I have just come in from a long disagreeable day in
Rochester where we are having clothes made. It