When I look back on my experience in London I cannot but see that I never became a part of it, never truly lived in its life. That may have been only because a quarter of a century spent as an autocrat among small boys is not perhaps the ideal preparation for living in a crowd, a herd without a leader, in which there is no rule of manners but: Be servile when you must, insolent when you can. Possibly the majority are so bred and trained that such a flurry and scurry seem to them normal and inevitable. I am sure very many are convinced that without intrigue and wirepulling they cannot get their bread, or the position which will ensure a continued supply. There they certainly are; wriggling and squirming and pushing; they like it; they make no move to get out of it; their existence is bound up in it and they fight to preserve it without looking further. They will tell you that they are assisting "movements," but they are only following fashions. . . . What movement are you in? Matilda, I gather, is a fashion. I never knew her follow anything but her own desire, and as her desires are human and reasonable she has risen by the law of gravity above the rout, above the difficulties of her own nature, above any incongruities that arise between her individuality and the conventions of the common life of England. And of course she rises above the work she has to do, the idiotic songs written for her, the meaningless dances devised to sort with the pointless tunes. And when she suffers from the emptiness of it all, she has you, and she has the memory of myself to guard her against the filthy welter from which she sprang. She used me--(you will let her read this)--and I am proud to have served her. There are many people like Matilda, comedians and entertainers, who develop a certain strength of personality in their revolt against the conditions of their breeding. It is impossible to educate them. Their intentions are too direct. . . . Not all of them succeed, or have the luck to become the fashion. You are one of them yourself, my dear Panoukian, and in the days when I was living with you two I used excitedly to think that there was a whole generation of them; that the young men and women of England were at last insisting on growing out of adolescence. Sometimes I felt very sure of it, but I was too sanguine. Life does not act like that; there are no sudden general growths. There are violent reactions, but they are soon swallowed up in the great forward flow.