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written in 1911, she writes: St. Petersburg 1911. "I do not love humanity in the mass. I don't admire it. I feel sorry for the unenlightened and suffering but I think there are only a few in the world who 'vindicate,' as Uncle Herbert says, their right to exist. If there was for one moment in my heart what I feel for dogs, cats, horses and animals in general, I would be a real sister of charity. It is a perfectly distinct expansion and impulse and a real longing to help and joy in it that I do not feel in the face of suffering humanity. You can explain it any way. If all these crippled numberless that I have seen all these days had been maimed dogs, I don't know what I would have done. There is something in human nature that is so contemptible and poor that I can't feel the same way." St. Petersburg 1911. "How can you keep your faith in humanity? I think it is all so weak and not beautiful, and life as it goes somehow such an outrageous fizzle. Why are there such beautiful things, conceptions, possibilities only to be ruined by fatal microbes this human nature puts into it? Life only in yearning; Death to crown realization; peace only in oblivion. What for? And even the power of renounciation has to be fought for." She was working at that time in the Kaufman community but was to go to Montenegro for a hospital reorganization. This did not come about. She wrote: St. Petersburg 1911. "I am undergoing the greatest disappointment at this moment. I was to be sent to Montenegro to establish a Red Cross sisterhood and overhaul the hospital, and to be given five sisters to take with me I as the head--so interesting--and in the part of the world which has always attracted me to the utmost, ever since I was in Sofia. And after it was all arranged and I was simply reveling in every detail, Baroness Ixkull decided that it was simply impossible to take Tibi." St. Petersburg 1911. "One doesn't love anything any more, religion, country, art. The only thing is to have one's interest outside of oneself--and to be very busy. I can hardly believe, at least I wonder, at myself being able to do so many things I dislike--getting up every day so early, no walks with Tibi, sleeping between five and six hours, often only four, and yet I enjoy everything--ice cream is a festival, a moment to sew a treat, and bed heaven." "But oh, all these sick people--so depressing and gives one such an impression of superfluity of the h
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