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Vienna IX, Berggasse 19
March 19, 1908
My dear Mathilde
It is the first time that you have asked me for help and you don't make it difficult for me this time, for it is easy to see that you are very much overrating your trouble and that you are drawing conclusions which according to my knowledge and information are quite out of place. I am not going to offer you any illusions, neither now nor at any other time; I consider them harmful and I know that the suspicion that they are illusions is enough to spoil the pleasure in them. But none is needed, anyhow. Meran1 is intended to strengthen you physically, for which it is very suitable; of course it cannot cure the local complaint; this has to take care of itself for the time being. It will probably go on giving you pain for several months (as a matter of fact your last attack sounds as though it may have been caused by a floating kidney), but it is harmless in itself; it is bound to shrink more and more and finally leave you altogether. Women often contract such things after childbirth, and they disappear without causing any trouble in later life. By the time the question of marriage arises in your life, you will be completely free of it. You know that I have always intended to keep you at home until you are at least twenty-four, until you are strong enough for the duties of marriage and possibly of bearing children, and until the weakness, which those three serious illnesses in your early life left behind, have been repaired. In social and material circumstances like ours, girls quite rightly do not marry during their early youth; otherwise their married life would be over too soon. You know that your mother was twenty-five when she married.
I think you probably associate the present minor complaint with an old worry about which I should very much like to talk to you for once. I have guessed for a long time that in spite of all your common sense you fret because you think you are not good-looking enough and therefore mig