To Elizabeth Stephens Fish Potter
C/o Brown Shipley & Co 123 Pall Mall, London
Madrid, Jan. 4, 1921
Dear Mrs Potter,
I have before me not only your good letter of Dec. 14, but a photograph of the hall at Antietam Farm, and both make me wish that I could transfer myself by some miraculous process into your midst, even if was to remain incognito while there. This soothing idea has been suggested to me before, by my friend Apthorp Fuller, who also possesses a “farm”, and I think in an even more savage and remote region than yours: but it seems to follow that I should have to be incognito at both places, and also presumably at my brother’s; my old friend Mrs Toy would have to be let into the secret; and I might as well be interviewed in New York harbor on board the tooting steamer, and have my portrait in the next Sunday’s papers, with appropriate headlines: Cynic Santayana Sings Home Sweet Home; etc. Besides would my life be safe? My English friends seem to think not, although what I hear from America is all most dulcet and affectionate.
Together with your letter I receive one from Cuningham Graham who says: “If you return again to the United States, you will find the new adaptation by Colt of the Browning pistol, with the hair-trigger stop, the safest and quickest thing to have about you. Do not venture into the Middle West: there may be a feeling that may translate itself awkwardly.”
From The Letters of George Santayana: Book Three, 1921-1927. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002.
Location of manuscript: The Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge MA