20 June 1915
Dear old things,
My weekend was as nice as could be. The Salts live in an area known as the Main Line, where rich Philadelphians have built themselves large country houses. It’s arable country with low walls between the fields, and little woods, and every so often a big house. Atholl is a grey stone baronial building. The interior is in various styles – William and Mary, what they call Adams, clubland. Thomas would detest it, he’d find it impure. It’s grand but comfortable, with a panelled gallery and drawing rooms and a library, and cosy rooms as well. They have family portraits even though they only made their fortune two generations ago, in iron. Iron is considered highly respectable, though they don’t talk about money, it’s just assumed you have it.
They’re mad about England, at least what they think of as England. They play golf and have cricket clubs, they read Punch and The Illustrated London News. Mr Salt, my friend’s son, has his suits and shirts made in Savile Row. But people here are proud to be from Philadelphia, they consider it the best place in the world. Philadelphia has the earliest of everything in the States, the first hospital, the first gentlemen’s club. They consider New York an insane, vulgar city, and Washington full of skulduggery.
There’s no garden at Atholl but a park and an ornamental farm with white fences along the fields. They have a pack of hounds and at night you hear them baying in the kennels. All round the edge of the farm there are smaller houses for other members of the family, actually they’re very roomy. We visited several of these relations, I felt I was being shown off. It’s very friendly, unknown people leap up, holding out their hand.
We talk endlessly about the war, I never feel fully off duty. People take one by surprise, you think how easy and genial someone is, then suddenly they ask a tough question, and don’t let you wriggle away with a joke as people might at home.
The war seems immensely distant, people talk as though it has nothing to do with them, like a theatrical entertainment which has gone on too long. It’s hard to recognise that Europe’s increasingly irrelevant here.
There were some nice people staying at the weekend, especially the Salts’ daughter Margaret. She’s a graduate of Bryn Mawr, it’s a new women’s college, though when I mentioned it to a lady in Washington she said Bryn Mawr girls never wash. Old Philadelphia families don’t usually send their daughters there.
I know I ought not to be enjoying myself but I’m afraid I am. I do work extremely hard, H. E. hardly lets us stop, constantly wants to know whom we’ve been seeing, what Americans are saying about the war. He thinks that this war will be as bad as the Thirty Years’ War, Europe will tear itself apart, only America and China will survive.
We’re beginning to have some hot days, my apartment is very stuffy. I try not to move around too much – some might say that’s typical of me. H. E. is moving to Manchester-by-the-Sea for high summer, but I have to stay here.
I’m going to New York next weekend.
Very much love,
M.