A Woman of Independent Means Read Online Free PDF

Time seems so fluid here. We step back and forth from past to present and I can even glimpse the future, imagining grandchildren and great-grandchildren retracing our footsteps through the Forum.
    You would enjoy this city more than any we have seen. That must be why I think I see you on every street corner—or perhaps it is simply our long separation that causes me to envision what I most long to see. Our unborn child is already demanding its right to a separate identity. I was almost asleep just now when the kicking woke me. Now all is still again but I cannot go back to sleep so I sit awake dreaming of once again lying in your arms.
    All my love,
Bess

    August 19, 1913
Naples
    Dear Papa and Mavis,
    This is the last letter you will receive with a foreign postmark.
    Today we visited the ruins of Pompeii. Mother Steed says if she had a choice she would die like a citizen of Pompeii—caught without warning in the midst of life. Not I. I intend to give as much thought to my death as I have to my life. Nor do I want to be just another name in a long list of victims. I have no intention of being associated in death with people whose company I would not choose in life.
    What is there about traveling in Europe that makes one view one’s own life as part of history? It is an exhilarating feeling and one I never experienced living in Texas. But it is a perspective I plan to keep for the rest of my life.
    All my love,
Bess
    Mr. and Mrs. Robert Randolph Steed
proudly announce the birth
of their first daughter
Eleanor Elizabeth
born August 25, 1913
aboard the “Nuovo Mondo”
en route from Naples, Italy, to Galveston, Texas
    October 12, 1914
Dallas
    Frau Heinrich Mittler
6 Mindenstrasse
München, Deutschland
    Â 
    My dear Frau Mittler,
    Annie has just told me of the sad loss of your son in the war. My deepest condolences. I am heartsick at what has befallen all the places and people we came to love just a summer ago. It is difficult for us to understand at this distance what is happening in Europe. No matter what official position our country takes, I will remain torn between the two sides, like my own great-grandmother, who had sons fighting against each other in our War Between the States.
    You were so kind to us when we were in Germany, and Annie is like a member of our own family. You have my assurance that she will be always.
    With deepest sympathy and abiding affection, I remain,
    Yours truly,
Bess Steed

    May 15, 1915
Dallas
    Dear Papa and Mavis,
    It breaks my heart to think of the fate that has befallen our lovely Lusitania since she carried us across the Atlantic two years ago. And though I pray we will return some day, we will never again see the Europe we saw in 1913.
    We are all in good health, though Rob is working so hard I fear for his. Life insurance keeps him away from home more than I would like, but a new business is much like a new baby. It demands your total attention in the early years but soon grows quite independent. Eleanor no longer walks anywhere, she runs. None of us can keep up with her. I hope there is a special angel that looks out for small children because it is an impossible task for anyone without wings.
    Annie has been in a state of great emotional stress ever since the war started, and I am afraid the job of caring for the children has become too much for her. So I have relieved her of that responsibility and her work is now confined to housekeeping. I have hired a lovely Scottish gentlewoman, the mother of the golf pro at the Dallas Country Club, to look after the children. Her name is Flora McCullough and her brogue is as pronounced as Annie’s thick German accent but it is a more pleasing sound, especially in these troubled times. She is quite a bit older than Annie but the children are past the age of needing purely physical care; what they require now is someone from a background compatible to their own to give direction to their minds.
    Much