Baghdad. June 16 Darling Mother. Decidedly a pageant is a much bigger undertaking than a museum. I wonder if you sometimes think, as I do, that you will never get through with it! But it was a great satisfaction this morning to see the public actually looking at the room which the King opened on Monday. It is only open two days a week for a couple of hours because all my staff (an old Arab curator, a very intelligent Jew clerk and an odd man) is so busy. We are now beginning to see daylight through the preliminary task of numbering the objects - between 3 and 4 thousand of them.
I do hope that Eric Serocold will get better - it would be terrible if he didn't. And meantime you have not got Elizabeth.

It is being a very grim world, isn't it. I feel often that I don't know how I should face it but for the work I'm doing and I know you must feel the same. I think of you month after month as the time passes since that awful sorrow, and realize all the time that the passage of the months can make little difference. I wish I were coming home this summer but I feel sure that when I leave I shall not want to come back here and I would like to finish this job first - indeed I feel that I must finish it, there being no one else. But it is too lonely, my existence here; one can't go on forever living alone. At least I don't feel I can.

I love your letters - bless you for them. Ever your devoted daughter Gertrude