Puritans claim to be fervent Christians who draw all their wisdom from the Bible. In my mind they have no Christianity at all. They cling to their creed of the badness of human nature, because it helps them in their unnatural war of commercial selfishness. As you would get the better of your opponents, and to the commercial mind all the neighbours are opponents except here and there a fellow conspirator, it is a mighty encouragement to be able religiously to believe the worst of them; that is why puritanism flourishes among traders. This combination of selfishness and religion results in the belief, implied rather than expressed, that a successful man is a sort of a secular saint, and it lay like a heavy stone on George's conscience. He tried to cast it from him; he expressed his scorn of it; I've heard him do so again and again; yet he could not altogether get rid of the obstruction. At any rate I cannot otherwise account for the fact that I myself, who was his oldest and indeed his only friend, was in the latter years of his life an exile from his affections. But my son was the pride of his life. (Ah, if he had only been called Pollexfen instead of Yeats.) An applauded poet is better after all than a rich trader, a more conspicuous success. He would have liked to have kept him always with him, that he might watch over him as he did over his race-horses. My son tells me that dining with him was like taking a doctor's prescription, so careful was George that he should eat the right food and chew it properly. The racing men of Sligo, when in the evening they visited the old bachelor to benefit by his knowledge of the racing world, always opened operations by inquiring about the nephew, & when he had exhausted this subject which took some time and must have bored them terribly, those poor fellows who cared as much for poetry as they did for Sanscrit, would artfully lead him to the other subject of his affections. After which they would depart and make their bets. He himself never made a bet. I think indeed he once lost or won, I forget which, ten shillings. He has told me with perfect sincerity, indeed with shame and contrition of spirit, that he disliked making money because it put him to so much trouble, and yet he was most careful of it, and though he would lend money to a friend and ask no security, he had to be perfectly satisfied in the most meticulous way as to the nature of the demand so that he might lend on some ascertained principle. The same sense of order, the same physical moral and mental neatness kept him a lonely bachelor. In his eyes marriage and domestic entanglements were things disorderly, all chance and change, a sort of wild experiment. More than once he had expressed to me his wonder, that sensible men would incur such risks.