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#1918: Willa Cather to Elsie Cather, August 23 [1932]

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My Dear, Dear Sister1;

I can't tell you how glad and relieved I was to get your note and to learn that you have really got some satisfaction and pleasure out of your busy summer. I do hope you will take a few weeks rest at the end, and not keep on doing things up to the last, but recline and enjoy what you have already done. The undone things can wait for another [illegible] summer. And please thank Bessie3 for her long, newsy letter and her account of everything. I always enjoy her letters so much, and I have read this one many times over, and once aloud. But please give Bess a soft lead pencil to write with, it will be much easier on her eyes and mine. Why do people ever use hard pencils?

I think it was lovely of you to have Ethel4 and the chil-dren there, and it does my heart good to think what a joyful time Charles5 and Helen Louise6 must have had. I am so glad Jess7 and her boys8 like Charles Edwin. He is easily crushed when people don't like him.

The astronomers are in great distress because I gave the wrong name to the behaviour of the planet Venus which I personally witnessed on the Wieners'9 back porch in the sum-mer of 1893. It should be called an 'occultation', not a transit. It has been corrected in the second printing10. The first man to telegraph about it was not an astronomer, but the ubiquitous Professor Phelps11, of Yale. I enclose his reply to my letter of thanks12. Glance at it and tear it up.