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Chicago ever since I last saw you? Ah! Why take a house in Mount Vernon street if ever so pleasant. I really believe that a rational life is only to be lived on this side of the water.  

Stillman, I don't know if you ever read his articles, I always do they are so pessimistic, thinks that the World has no further use for painting, except perhaps as a lesson in leisure. That is a lesson Americans need to learn, and to think that I who have learned it deliberately gave myself away, & prepared to do a work for which I ought to have taken three years in six months! We had a sudden rush over of my [[strikethrough]] bother [[/strikethrough]] eldest brother & his family in August, partly to escape the heat but principally to leave my youngest niece (seventeen) with her grandmother & me to go to school in Paris this winter.  One look at the size of my canvasses was enough. Back they all went again.  My brother very much

disgusted, it is the first time I have failed him. I suppose your baby nephew is delightful, just the interesting age for a baby from that in to eighteen months. I sincerely trust they will spank him before he gets to be the age of our youngest hope whom you had the pleasure of travelling with.

I am so glad you saw the Degas in Faure's collection, you can now understand why the French artists put him so high or far above all the rest. I have only seen him once this summer for a few moments at the funeral of Ch. Durand Ruel, a most sad occassion [[occasion]]. To tell the truth I needed all my sang-froid & Degas takes a pleasure in throwing one off the track, for years I have never shown him any thing without its being finished. At Durand Ruel's there has been an exhibition of a series of landscapes in parallel