Note.--Three small, spirited pen drawings are incorporated into this letter at the points indicated in the printed text. * * * * * A. E. F. Dear Aline: Sorry to use this absurd paper--but none other is accessible. I’m in a hospital at present--been here for three days with a strained muscle. It has been delightful to sleep between sheets again--I have rested up beautifully, I go back to the regiment to-morrow. I sent you two batches of copy recently--or three, rather. Hope you get them--but if you don’t, I’ll write some more--like Caterina, you know when she was defending her husband’s castle against the enemy. The enemy took her six children as hostages. “Surrender the castle, or I’ll kill the children!” said he. “Go ahead, kill ’em!” said Caterina. “I can make more!” As to your plan of renting a house at Shirley--wherever that is--for the Summer, go ahead, if you must--I don’t think there is any chance of my getting home this Summer. If I do come home, I’ll cable you in time for you to get back to Larchmont before my arrival. Larchmont is just about far enough from New York. Not for many a year will I consent to spend a day in any place more rural. I have had enough of wildness and rawness and primitiveness--the rest of my life, I hope, will be spent in the effetest civilization. I don’t want to be more than an hour’s distance from the Biltmore grill and the Knickerbocker bar. And God preserve me from farms! I love you. JOYCE. * * * * * March 12, 1918. Dear Aline: I receive your letters frequently and regularly, and they are delightful, stimulating, typical. To-day I returned from a week’s sojourn in a charming hospital (a strained muscle, now healed, sent me there) and I found two letters from you awaiting me, the latest dated February 12. Let me congratulate you on your aviation poem--most beautiful and true, the most intellectual poem you have made. By all means put it in your book. I received Francis Carlin’s wholly heavenly book just before I went to the hospital, and have read it many times with delight. When you see him, give him my homage. He should be walking goldener floors than those of a mortal shop--he should rather be over here with us, whatever his convictions may be. For it is wrong for a poet--especially a Gael--to be listening to elevated trains when there are screaming shells to hear, and to be sleeping soft in a bed when there’s a cot in a dug-out awaiting him, and the bright face of danger to dream about, and see. I treasure your picture, and Christopher’s shadowy profile--send me more photographs. Love me constantly, never let a day pass without going to church for me.