Chydyok, wednesday.

Dearest Joan, I am writing you on the typewriter hoping you may be able to read the words. I have just given your name to an old acquaintance and hope that you will be willing to ask her to tea if she calls up. I have not seen her for twenty years and she is now working for UNRRA and will be soon sent to Germany. She is American and was Scofield Thayer's secretary. She is married to a well known artist called Glinkencamp, but I think has been long separated from him. She supported her little girl and her husband both for a long time. After Scofield went mad she also lost her reason for a time and was in an asylum. She was plucky, adventurous, extremely capable. She knows a good deal about artistic matters and was employed in the Metropolitan Museum for a time. I told her that she could not stay in my house as I had no room but I could find a place for her to spend a week end in the village. She expects to be called away at any minute. I do not think you would find her boring, but I knew her chiefly through her being with Scofield. It would be of interest to me to know what she is now like for she must be about fifty and I still think of her as thirty. She may be bold, loud voiced, and entirely changed. She is, or was, crazily daring.

I shan't be able to write you really until I know you can use your pen. I can imagine how extremely irrelevant my last letter with its enclosures must have been to Louis with his life packed as tight as my green chest in my bed room the top of which I can never get to close for that reason. One of the things it contains is a coat of his. Do you think he would like me to send it to him? I am always afraid of moths getting into cloth. I have moth balls in it but my moths eat right through moth balls. They enjoy them. I have a great deal to say about one or two things you wrote in your last letter, but I await your glasses. Here the rains come down, the wind blows, and autumn will soon be winter. I burn no fires except when I have company and now that Werner has gone I have no company.

You live in such a dream that I can only reach you by asking you to do something. I think it is true that Louis is lucky, but that is the result of his nature. Harry has his religion, his art, and love. Would he give up either his religion or his

art for a secure home and several girls to be fond of him and
flatter him? No, he wouldnt give up either one or the other for
anything. He lives three separate existences. I think anyone who
is loved is lucky and to be loved by you is a complete fortune
whether appreciated or not. Louis would turn misfortune into for-
tune, while Harry would turn fortune into misfortune. Harry's
complicated and sensitive nature - - - - At this very moment
Gertrude came to tell me that she had just had a telephone from
Littleton to say that he had just heard that John had been taken
to some Military hospital near Corwen with a bad pain that had
kept him up all the night, some new kind of attack he has never
had before and this is such a crushing anxiety that it has driven
everything out of my head. I keep picturing Phyllis, so frail,
having to bear everything, and to be helpless when somebody we love
is in pain -- what greater torture can they be? I only realize
when John's life is menaced how much he means to me. Gertrude
thinks he will have an operation and come through it because his
heart is so strong, but I don't trust doctors at all. If it hadn't
been for his going to stay with his son at Valle Crucis, because
his son is a priest and his religion forbids him to come to John
when he is living with Phyllis, this would never have happened.
It exhausted him and made him give up his usual routine, or so
Gertrude says.

I think paintings have a very great effect on people's lives.
Oliver Lodge told me that after his wife died the one thing that
restored his wish to live -- and the only one -- was seeing the
pictures at the National Gallery, and portraits preserve the fame
of the artist and the person to whom he has given life in the
painting. How much is the painting at the Leicester Gallery?
Harry's pictures will undoubtedly one day bring enormous prices.
I know how Meum feels, I can say the same, but we live or die through
our own strength, and she has love in her life and will always have
it.

I am terribly upset and must stop. Let me know when you have
your glasses. That friend's name is Eleanor Parker (Miss) in
case she calls up. Godd bye, darling Joan.

Next morning. I now add this line, dearest Joan, a day of increas-
ing gales and wild rain. You did not say when your altruistic act
of staying with that man in a hotel was to be. I think we are more
apt to regret our ungenerous actions than our generous ones and any-
way we have to follow our natures and your nature is not a cautious
and withdrawing one but an adventurous and out going one. Why does
he want a divorce if there is no other girl he wants to marry, or
is it his wife that has asked him for it? If there were another
girl she would go to the hotel with him. Don't leave me all in the
air about this. I hope you keep your journal and write it all down.
John Fisher's wife and children are all going to New Zealand to
live. I think it is all very sad. Juanita almost killed an Ital-
ian working for them and I believe the police had to be called in.
I long to see you, dearest Joan, and look forward more than I can
say to your promised visit. I hope nothing will happen to make you
alter your mind. An admirer of Llewelyn's books walked all the
way from Weymouth here with his little boy aged nine, a most charm-
ing sensitive little boy who, when he saw rings being put in the
noses of some boars owned by his father went away in a flood of tears.
Later placards were discovered put up all about with the words 'Put
rings in men's noses not boars', which he had written out himself.
They walked back to Weymouth again, certainly a walk, as they took it,
of twenty-four miles, which I think was a great distance for a child
of nine who has to take two steps to his father's one.
and laterly

If Louis is back give him my love and say that I expect no answer
to my letter for I know his time is all filled up. I do not know
whether John's illness will make a difference in Meum's plans. I
am sure Redwood will be all the more anxious for her company, but
she was looking forward to seeing John and Phyllis and they were
looking forward to seeing her. It is a great black cloud of
anxiety on the horizon.

Ade

With my devoted love,

If you don't see the cups or tea pot for Gertrude I can give
her some Cox's orange pippin apples as I have ordered some
for myself and could give her them to her. I want to give some-
thing to the woman Mr Miller is going to marry. Would there be
a brooch or some other trinket for about seven shillings that
your jeweller might have?

FROM THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF BENJAMIN ROBERT HAYDON when he and David Wilkie visited Paris in 1814

There seemed to be a species of military instinct in all classes. No
young man appeared to have finished his education till after a bloody
campaign. They spoke of war as a thing of course, of its horrors as
"the sort de la guerre", as if the miseries of war were as much a constituent part of the existence of continental nations as their climate.
There was an apathy, a notion of dark destiny about the thing, as
though the bloody turmoil the rising generation had been in had utterly
destroyed their preparation of right. "They were at this singular period
without the least exaggeration, a century behind us in notions
of legal and moral responsibility. . . . Napoleon's system was in-
spired by all the genius and energy of a demon . . . Any people might
by degrees be corrupted by such a system, but how terrible its operation
on a nation like the French! Vain, insolent, thoughtless, blood-thirsty, and impetuous by nature, so susceptible to error as to have
their little sense blinded by that error -- a people who are brilliant
without intensity, have courage without firmness, and