Dear Miss Addams,
I was happy to hear from [Miss] Breckinridge that you are at home again in Hull House and I hope fast gaining strength. Dear me, how I should like to see you but I hope I shall be seeing you in the East before long.
I have had a long talk with Miss Pendleton and thought things over and I do not feel that I have any business to leave [page 2] my classes and break up the year's work for my students two years running, unless for the most extraordinary emergency necessity and I do not feel that the present situation as far as I am concerned is such as to justify my going <away> till college closes.
My plan is to find someone to take my work for all of next year and in that case I expect to be granted a "sabbatical year" which would give me 15 months free. If I follow you to Europe in the [page 3] latter part of June, how would that be? One place I have been turning over in my mind is to spend the time in Switzerland, perhaps in Zurich, studying perhaps the question of different nationalities under one government and the whole question of national minorities; and getting into touch with German and French points of and perhaps Russian points of view there. This is a mere tentative idea. How does it strike you? Or how would it seem to you that I might [page 4] most usefully spend my time?
I think of you so much. I do just hate the idea of your being ill. So for every reason, do be good to yourself and not hurry too fast ahead of [your] returning strength.
With every good wish of the New Year -- may it bring Peace with it and that speedily and a good Peace with good fruits to follow it -- how we all wish it!
Your affectionate
Emily G Balch
If I have decided to go over now I should have felt I must postpone [page 5] the plan for a Sabbatical Year and I am inclined to think 15 months beginning in June will be worth more than 7 months beginning in February for I hope this will permit me to get to the Congress after the war ends.
The one sure thing is that it will end some day.
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