When reading and writing failed as diversion, Mark Twain often turned to mathematics.  With no special talent for accuracy in the matter of figures, he had a curious fondness for calculations, scientific and financial, and he used to cover pages, ciphering at one thing and another, arriving pretty inevitably at the wrong results.  When the problem was financial, and had to do with his own fortunes, his figures were as likely as not to leave him in a state of panic.  The expenditures were naturally heavy that spring; and one night, when he had nothing better to do, he figured the relative proportion to his income.  The result showed that they were headed straight for financial ruin.  He put in the rest of the night fearfully rolling and tossing, and reconstructing his figures that grew always worse, and next morning summoned Jean and Clara and petrified them with the announcement that the cost of living was one hundred and twenty-five per cent. more than the money-supply.

Writing to MacAlister three days later he said: 

It was a mistake.  When I came down in the morning, a gray and aged wreck, I found that in some unaccountable way (unaccountable to a business man, but not to me) I had multiplied the totals by two.  By God, I dropped seventy-five years on the floor where I stood!

Do you know it affected me as one is affected when one wakes out of a hideous dream & finds it was only a dream.  It was a great comfort & satisfaction to me to call the daughters to a private meeting of the board again.  Certainly there is a blistering & awful reality about a well-arranged unreality.  It is quite within the possibilities that two or three nights like that of mine would drive a man to suicide.  He would refuse to examine the figures, they would revolt him so, & he would go to his death unaware that there was nothing serious about them.  I cannot get that night out of my head, it was so vivid, so real, so ghastly:  In any other year of these thirty-three the relief would have been simple:  go where you can, cut your cloth to fit your income.  You can’t do that when your wife can’t be moved, even from one room to the next.

The doctor & a specialist met in conspiracy five days ago, & in their belief she will by and by come out of this as good as new, substantially.  They ordered her to Italy for next winter—­which seems to indicate that by autumn she will be able to undertake the voyage.  So Clara is writing to a Florence friend to take a look around among the villas for us in the regions near that city.

CCXXVIII

PROFFERED HONORS

Mark Twain had been at home well on toward three years; but his popularity showed no signs of diminishing.  So far from having waned, it had surged to a higher point than ever before.  His crusade against public and private abuses had stirred readers, and had set them to thinking; the news of illness in his household; a report that he was contemplating another residence abroad—­these things moved deeply the public heart, and a tide of letters flowed in, letters of every sort—­of sympathy, of love, or hearty endorsement, whatever his attitude of reform.