Each of your letters has struck a responsive chord within my own breast. What stupendous changes have taken place all around us since we received our degrees, and how baffling and inscrutable are the days that lie ahead. Nina speaks of her mother. I can tell her that nothing can appear to be wholly bad or desperate while one's Mother still lives. She always knows that tomorrow things will be different and better. And, miraculously, they always were.

I cannot remember where I left off in my last letter. In 1926 I spend a summer in Europe and shortly after my return, was appointed as a Assistant City Solicitor in the city's Law Department. I held the position until there was a change in the administration, and then opened an office with Marie Presstman, lawyer and member of the Maryland State Board of Motion Picture censors. It was a hard uphill fight, inasmuch as the depression was just setting in, and even lawyers of established reputation were feeling the pinch. I shall never cease to be amused at the irony implicit in a letter that was sent to all the women members of the bar as well as to the men by the Baltimore Bar Association asking them to contribute to a fund to aid needy lawyers, in the face of the fact that the Bar Association had never admitted women to its membership.

In addition to my law practice, I served as managing editor of Equal Rights, national Feminist weekly, and also managed to do a little free-lance scribbling. The law practice was increasing slowly but steadily when my brother died - in January, 1935 - leaving a wife and five children, ages ranging from nine to nineteen. His death was very sudden, a heart attack, and none of the children had been trained in his business, manufacturing lithography. Of our immediate family only my sister Elsa understood anything about the business. It seemed a dreadful waste to abandon it, especially as my brother's four boys would be looking for jobs in a few years. Four of the children were in their adolescent years. All needed more schooling.

At the same time, the opportunity of taking over the librarian ship of the Times Herald in Washington which meant a steady income instead of fluctuating fees was offered to me. We decided that Elsa should devote what time she could spare from her own profession of Certified Public Accountant to my brother's business, that I should go to Washington, and that Louisa should continue in her position with The Baltimore News, that Elsa's services to the business would be free, but that we would divide all our other earnings in three equal parts.

It is a considerable undertaking, but things look much less chaotic than they did a year or so ago. I am rapping on wood as I write. The four older children are in good private schools, two of the boys being boarding students at McDonough, recognized as one of the finest schools for boys in the country. That Elsa should have been able to raise the tuition for all four, we feel, is in itself an accomplishment.

I thought I should be able to keep up my law practice with my work in Washington - in fact, I was told that I could take time off now and then for that purpose; but the commuting is very wearing, and I find that the job in Washington is about all that I can attend to. I found it almost as hard to give up the practice I had built up as it was to acquire it. Last spring I succeeded in getting a $9000 reduction in the real estate assessment of the Woman's City Club for which I had been counsel. I was very proud of that because it meant a stiff fight with the taxing authorities who want to garner every shekel they can lay their hands on; but I could not do much of that kind of thing while I am going back and forth to Washington. I am hoping that the time will come when I shall have the leisure to study and practice law again, and perhaps do a little writing, too.

I had two little vacations this summer, each a week in length, and both delightful. One was a week at the seashore, at Rehoboth Delaware with my sister Helene, and her three lovely little girls. The other was a visit, or rather re-visit, to Niagara Falls. On the latter I was accompanied by Edna Frizzell Thurlow of the Class of 1904 and by a school-mate of high school days, who is also a friend and schoolmate of Mary Abercrombie - Gertrude Meyers, a graduate of the Maryland Institute art school, and a teacher of art at Penn Hall, Chambersburg, Pa.

(Hiatus of a few days) Edna Thurlow's young son, William, twelve, said he had no regrets about not accompanying his mother and us on our trip to Niagara, because women of our age usually talked of nothing but illnesses and funerals. I am sorry to have to drag in a cemetery, but I am sure you will overlook it in order that I may give you a little word about Dr. Shefloe. Yesterday, Sunday, as we were leaving Loudon Park, he was entering. He saw us and stopped to talk for a few minutes. I asked him whether he had recently seen or heard from any members of the class. He said, he had not - rather wistfully, I thought - so there's your chance. We, my sisters and I, thought he was looking very well.

Several of you mention the accumulating years. When I asked the eye specialist who gave me my bifocals why I had to be afflicted with them when So-and So's grandmother had never had to wear glasses and could thread a needle at eighty, he looked at me pityingly and explained that the grandmother was an 'old myopic'. She was born near-sighted, so that with age her vision was becoming normal. I think age brings substantial compensations, one of the greatest being our freedom from the slavery of trifles and trivialities. Don't you all feel that in many respects, you are younger in spirit than when you were in college? There is no-one younger than Bernard Shaw, or than Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes was the year before he died. You may recall the short but wonderful radio address he made on his last birthday, with its special message to the youth of our land. He ended with the words of a Greek philosopher: 'Death hath plucked my ear, and said, 'Live, for I am coming!' It is a great mistake to allow yourself to grow old- - and worse still to admit it.

Yours with love for the next hundred years,
Emilie

Sept. 31/36