Millay_magnTo Daniel MacGhie Cory
Rome. May 29, 1931

After some vacillation I am sending you only your ordinary extraordinary budget for June. If the doctor’s bills, etc, make this insufficient, you will tell me frankly. I don’t want you to be skimped, but at the same time, if you have too much at once, you are tempted to make a splurge. On the other hand, this habit probably comes from the very fact that you have always been fed from hand to mouth, lived on the dole, as it were, which at your age is hardly normal. It would be better if you could have a fixed income and a bank account of your own, so that you could feel you were your own master.

Can you tell me whether “Edna St. Vincent Millay” is Miss or Mrs. and if the latter, what Mrs, or whose Missus? She has sent me a book of 52 sonnets, rather fluent, and only letting the cloven hoof peep out here and there from under the Elizabethan petticoat. But there are good-humoured inscriptions and comments of her own in pencil, which make me wish to write and thank her. Would you care to see the book?

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Four, 1928-1932.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: Butler Library, Columbia University, New York NY