To Rosamond Thomas Bennett Sturgis
Hotel Bristol
Rome. March 26, 1926
If you have found the children well, and stocks not hopelessly demoralized by the panic—of which I have heard only a first alarm, perhaps exaggerated—you can both of you congratulate yourselves on the result, because you have not only had a holiday and a change, but you have given your old relations a great deal of pleasure. Let me whisper in your ear that you, personally, were a little disappointing at first, because we expected a roaring Amazon, carrying everything before her and sweeping us old people off our feet: but nothing of the sort. You turned out to be remarkably feminine for these times, what in Victorian…days would have been called very attractive, and so far from Herculean that sometimes you seemed a little frail, and I was afraid you did more than was good for you. However, now that you are safe at home you can have as lazy and sleepy a time as household cares allow and the long summer in which to get fat and sunburned.
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