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Noordwijk, August 16, 1910
Dear friend,
I am enclosing the letter that I received today from North German Lloyd in Bremen. Leaving aside whether my hesitation or the ineptitude of the agent in The Hague spoiled our chances with the Yorck, the fact of the matter now is that we wouldn't be in Genoa before September 14 nor in Palermo before the 10th, and we would therefore have too little time for Sicily. Actually, with this objective in mind we would have been cutting it close even five days earlier—with the Yorck. To pick out other ships where accommodations and service are certainly not as good as with Lloyd is perhaps not so enticing. In view of this it seems apparent that both aims—Mediterranean cruise through Gibraltar and comfortable stay in Sicily—are not easily compatible in the short time left at our disposal, and it behooves us to give one of them up. I suggest to you that we give up the Mediterranean and keep Sicily.
Many things speak against the cruise. We were on one not long ago and are able to form an opinion. The trip from Antwerp to Genoa corresponds to a ten-day-long imprisonment in a confined space. According to the letter from Lloyd we can again get only two bad cabins, or we would have to share a single better one. I know we would both feel confined. Think about the fact that no ship would have such large rooms for the passengers as our Washington, and that even there we didn't know what to do in the space of a cabin. But inside cabins would probably be very uncomfortable in the Mediterranean at the height of the summer. I also long to chat with you and to do some work, and I know that one is quite cramped on a ship, something like here by the sea. The freedom of innervation by one's surroundings seems to me to be a condition for intellectual activity.
Something else speaks in favor of giving up the cruise. If you come here in the last week of August, you could still go swimming with us and then at your leisure see Ghent, Bruges, and Brussels with us