The "club" has improved since I first joined it: we all now try to improvise something to earn our cake and whisky. Harding writes songs, Benson puts them to music, Jimson and I dance or tell stories, some one plays a banjo or a violin, and we rouse the night air with a catch. I don't altogether like even all the members of the club, but when I get very lonely or depressed in my own rooms I go there, in order to forget myself awhile. I don't seem able to make any close friend on the staff. There is no one there, for instance, who matters to me half so much as Tony, and at times I doubt whether I ought to take up so much of his attention. After all, a boy at school comes to play and work among his equals, not to mix with grown-ups. Tony has too many advanced ideas, owing, I suppose, to the books I lend him and the talks we have so frequently together. I must try to deny myself the pleasure of his society more than I do. Of late I have been extraordinarily pleased at some of the work which several boys have shown up. Really quite a number of the short stories and verses I get are worthy of publication in some magazines. I try to encourage boys to submit their best stuff after I have sub-edited it to various editors with whom I have dealings. Tony has already had one poem accepted by the _Monthly Magazine_. I find that the average boy drinks in Swinburne, Morris and Henley with extraordinary relish when he won't look at Keats and Shelley. The first business is to get him really interested in anything: the decadent phase will soon pass. I tried "The Dynasts" on them and failed miserably. The really good stuff is utterly beyond them--perhaps they'll remember later on and come back to it with proper understanding. I must share my own great joys and discoveries in literature: I can't keep a really fine thing like "The Dynasts" to myself. Common Room won't listen: they think I'm crazy on the moderns for whom they have no use--not that they read the ancients, but they do allow them a place in education. The moderns they abuse as mere wasters of time. I have been trying for various Head Masterships and been offered that of Chipping Campden. I was particularly tempted to accept it at first, because of the beauty of the place. Mais, Stapleton, and I used to walk out there from Oxford on Sundays: it is one of the most perfect mediæval towns I know, but it is probably too remote from the bustle of life for a man like myself. Anyway I refused it. _December 20, 1912_