None of my friends had liked the idea of my marriage, particularly to anyone as young as Nancy; one of them, Robbie Ross, Wilde’s literary executor, whom I had met through Siegfried and who had been very good to me, had gone so far as to try to discourage me by hinting that there was negro blood in the Nicholson family, that it was possible that one of Nancy’s and my children might revert to coal-black. Siegfried found it difficult to accustom himself to the idea of Nancy, whom he had not met, but he still wrote. After a few months at Craiglockhart, though he in no way renounced his pacifist views, he decided that the only possible thing to do was, after all, to go back to France. He had written to me in the previous October that seeing me again had made him more restless than ever. Hospital life was nearly unbearable; the feeling of isolation was the worst. He had had a long letter from Old Joe to say that the First Battalion had just got back to rest from Polygon Wood; the conditions and general situation were more appalling than anything he had yet seen—three miles of morasses, shell-holes and dead men and horses through which to get the rations up. Siegfried said that he would rather be anywhere than in hospital; he couldn’t bear to think of poor Old Joe lying out all night in shell-holes and being shelled (several of the ration party were killed, but at least, according to Joe, ‘the battalion got its rations’). If only the people who wrote leading articles for the _Morning Post_ about victory could read Joe’s letter!