All this that I feel about Etheredge I express badly. I cannot successfully put it into words. I make him sound smug and even selfish, whereas he has come very near to abolishing self--and thus has grown the more. The best I can do is to give up the attempt at portrayal and fall back on a few tangible results. Thus, I am not alone in my estimate of Etheredge. Quiet and unassuming though he is, people of distinction gravitate toward him. He has, to my knowledge, exerted a profound influence on three creative artists of international fame and upon a number of other individuals of even greater sensitiveness and fineness of character if of less effective talent. Again, if financial disaster were to overtake me to-morrow, Etheredge would, I know, share with me whatever he has. But it is not that which is of importance (he was always generous), but the fact that, though his income is very small, this would honestly seem to him now no hardship, of no importance. Yet again, neither he nor his wife has ever made a single sacrifice to comfort. They continue to live in one after another of the most inaccessible places in all Italy--places with no water, places with no light, places with toilet facilities straight out of the Stone Age. To plan a Tour of Discomfort I could hardly do better than enumerate the villages where they have lived. If this were ever for them an act of heroism, if they ever gave an impression of struggling bravely against heavy odds for the sake of the Higher Life, I should consider such behaviour with distaste. But they never do. They simply ignore the discomfort. All that mattered to them was that each of these places was a place of singular beauty and interest. They _liked_ living in them. And, whether I have made you feel Etheredge as important or have failed to do so, it must, with this, surely be apparent that his kind of development would be all but impossible in America. There are things about Etheredge that exasperate me at times. I cannot, for instance, understand both his and his wife’s failure to learn the language. Their Italian is distressing. Now Italian shopkeepers and servants are no worse than those or other countries--if anything, I think, a little better, being capable of extraordinary acts of generosity toward suddenly impoverished clients--but undoubtedly their dominant thought in the presence of strange and presumably wealthy foreigners living, heaven knows why, in their midst, and with difficulty stammering mistakenly a few phrases of the language, is that the Lord has delivered these into their hands. Accordingly, Etheredge and his wife have been the victims of a long series of minor frauds and peculations. I do not know why this should annoy me, but it does. It does not annoy them; they disregard it.