_I agree with some of what you say, but I disagree with a good deal more, and I am entirely opposed to your method of procedure, which is to put it very mildly rather casual. Your degree was not so good as it ought to have been, but I did not reproach you, because in the Consular Service you had chosen a career which did not call specially for a first. At the same time you could, if you had worked, have got a first quite easily. Your six months with the Macedonian Relief people seems to have knocked all your consular ambitions on the head rather too easily, I confess, to make me feel very happy about your future. And now without consulting me you take a house in the country for the purpose of writing poetry! You imply in answer to my remonstrances that I am unable to appreciate the 'necessity' for your step. That may be, but I cannot help asking where you would be now if I at your age, instead of helping my father with his school, had gone off to Oxfordshire to write poetry. Perhaps I had ambitions to make a name for myself with the pen. If I had, I quenched them in order to devote myself to what I considered my duty. I do not reproach you for refusing to carry on the school at Fox Hall. Your dear mother's last request was that I should not urge you to be a schoolmaster, unless you were drawn to the vocation. Her wishes I have respected, and I repeat that I am not hurt at your refusal. At the same time I cannot encourage what can only be described as this whim of yours to bury yourself in a remote village where, having saddled yourself with the responsibilities of a house, you announce your intention of living by poetry! I am the last person to underestimate the value of poetry, but as a livelihood it seems to me as little to be relied upon as the weather. However, you are of age. You have £150 a year of your own. You are with the exercise of the strictest economy independent. And this brings me to the point of your last letter in which you ask me to supplement your own income with an allowance £150 a year from me. This inclination to depend upon your father is not what I conceive to be the artist's spirit of independence. This over-drawing upon your achievement fills me with dismay for the future. However, since I do not wish you to begin hampered by debt and as you assure me that you have spent all your own money on this idiotic house, I will give you £150, to be paid in quarterly instalments of £37 10s. as from the 21st of this month for one year. Furthermore, at the end of next year if you find that poetry is less profitable than even you expect, I will offer you a place at Fox Hall, thereby securing for you the certainty of a life moderately free from financial worries. After all, even a