Dear Mr. Anstruther,--I assure you that we have all we want, so do not, please, go on feeling distressed about us. Why should you feel distressed? I am not certain that I do not resent it. Put baldly (you will say brutally), you have no right to be distressed, uneasy, anxious, and all the other things you say you are, about the private concerns of persons who are nothing to you. Even a lamb might conceivably feel nettled by persistent pity when it knows it has everything in the world it wants. Come now, if it is a question of pity, we will have it in the right place, and I will pity you. There is always, you know, a secret satisfaction in the soul of him who pities. He does hug himself, and whether he does it consciously or unconsciously depends on his aptitude for clear self-criticism. Compared with yours I deliberately consider my life glorious. And when will you see that there are kinds of gloriousness that cannot be measured in money or position? It is plain to me--and it would be so to you if you thought it over--that the less one has the more one enjoys. We want space, time, concentration, for getting at the true sweet root of life. And I think--and you probably do not--that the true sweet root of life is in any one thing, no matter what thing, on which your whole undisturbed attention is fixed. Once I read a little French story, years ago, with my mother, when I was a child, and I don't know now who wrote it or what it was called. It was the story of a prisoner who found a plant growing between the flags of the court he might walk in, and I think it was a wallflower; and it, unfolding itself slowly and putting out one tender bit of green after the other in that gray and stony place, stretched out little hands of life and hope and interest to the man who had come there a lost soul. It was the one thing he had. It ended by being his passion. With nothing else to distract him, he could study all its wonders. From that single plant he learned more than the hurried passer-on, free of the treasures of the universe, learns in a life. It saved him from despair. It brought him back to the eager interest in the marvellous world that soul feels which is unencumbered by too heavy a weight of trappings. Why, I still have too much; and here are you pitying me because I have not more when I am distracted by all the claims on my attention. I can look at whole beds of wallflowers every spring, and pass on with nothing but a vague admiration for their massed beauty of scent and color. I get nothing out of them but just that transient glimpse and whiff. There are too many. There is no time for them all. But shut me up for weeks alone with one of them in a pot, and I too would get out of it the measure of the height and the depth and the wonder of life.