Among the very few people that Mrs. Stevenson met in Mexico in a social way was the well-known historian and archaeologist, Mrs. Zelia Nuttall, whom she considered a most charming and interesting woman. Together with her daughter she lunched with Mrs. Nuttall at her picturesque house, once the home of Alvarado, in the outskirts of Mexico City. It was the oldest house they had ever seen, and, with its inner _patio_, outside stairways and balconies, and large collection of rare idols, pots, and weapons that Mrs. Nuttall had herself unearthed from old Indian ruins, was intensely interesting.
Hearing of an opening in the mining business at Oaxaca for her nephew, she decided to go there and look into the matter. Conditions at Oaxaca were found to be even more primitive than at the capital. One time they asked for hot water, but the American landlady threw up her hands and cried, "Oh, my dears! There is a water famine in Oaxaca. It is terrible. We can get you a very small jug to wash with, but it isn't clear enough to drink."
In answer to this she brought a large jug of bottled water that tasted strongly of sulphur. This they mixed with malted milk bought at a grocery, making a beverage of which they said that though they had tasted better in their time, they certainly never had tasted worse. Notwithstanding all these inconveniences Mrs. Stevenson was in the best of tempers and keenly interested in seeing places and things, and when she tired was happy with a magazine or sitting at a window watching the street life. The first evening, while they were sitting in the _patio_, there was a violent earthquake, which seemed to them worse than the famous shake of 1906 in San Francisco, but it did no damage and the hotel people made nothing of it.
After seeing her nephew off to the mines at Taviche, and taking a side trip to see the ancient buried city of Mitla, Mrs. Stevenson and her daughter returned to the capital, where they took train for California, and were soon at home again amid the sweet flowers of Stonehedge. There Mrs. Stevenson once more took up the writing of the introductions to her husband's books, for which she had contracted with Charles Scribner's Sons. As I have already said, it was only after much urging that she consented to do this work, and her almost painful shrinking from it appears in a letter of March 25, 1911, to Mr. Charles Scribner: "With this note I send the introduction to Father Damien. I didn't see how to touch upon the others when I know so little about them. I know this thing is about as bad as anything can be. I cringe whenever I think of it, but I seem incapable of doing better. If, however, it is beyond the pale, write and tell me, please, and I will try once again. Louis's work was so mixed up with his home life that it is hard to see just where to draw the line between telling enough and yet not too much. I dislike extremely drawing aside the veil to let the public gaze intimately where they have no right to look at all. I think it is the consciousness of this feeling that gives an extra woodenness to my style--style is a big word--I should have put it 'bad style.'"