J.M. Barrie's generous, enthusiastic note delights and inspires me again as I read it over. Mr. Morley, my old editor and critic, wrote: "I find it intensely interesting and with all the elements of beauty, power, and pathos." For Leslie Stephen, with whom I had only lately made warm and close friends, I had a copy bound, without the final chapter, that the book might not, by its tragic close, depress one who had known so much sorrow. Sir Alfred Lyall thought--"the story reaches a higher pitch of vigor and dramatic presentation than is to be found even in your later books"; while Lord Halifax's letter--"how lovable they both are, each in his way, and how true to the ideal on both sides!"--and others, from Mr. Godkin, of the American _Nation_, from Frederic Harrison, Lord Goschen, Lord Dufferin, and many, many more, produced in me that curious mood which for the artist is much nearer dread than boasting--dread that the best is over and that one will never earn such sympathy again. One letter not written to myself, from Mr. George Wyndham to Mr. Wilfred Ward, I have asked leave to print as a piece of independent criticism: On Sunday I read _Helbeck of Bannisdale_, and I confess that the book moved me a great deal. It is her best book. It is a true tragedy, because the crash is inevitable. This is not so easy to effect in Art as many suppose. There are very few characters and situations which lead to inevitable crashes. It is a thousand to one that a woman who thinks she ought not to marry a man, but loves him passionately, will, in fact, marry him. She will either discover an ingenious way out of her woods or else just shut her eyes and "go it blind," relying on his strength and feeling that it is really right to relinquish to him her sense of responsibility. In choosing a girl with nothing left her in the world but loyalty to a dead father and memory of his attitude toward religion, without knowledge of his arguments for that attitude, I think that Mrs. Ward has hit on the only possible _persona_. Had Laura, herself, been a convinced rationalist, or had her father been still alive, she would have merged herself and her attitude in Helbeck's strength of character. Being a work of art, self-consistent and inevitable, the book becomes symbolic. It is a picture of incompatibility, but, being a true picture, it is a symbolic index to the incompatible which plays so large a part in the experience of man.