forgotten your farm and your balloon-house and your daily reports upon the cuckoo and the corn-crake. But I haven't; and what's more, I'm quite ready to believe that if Bow Street went out of fashion you'd be the first to appreciate the fact. We should soon be hearing indeed that you had led the movement. And that's why you don't really stem the onward march of sanity, though there are casualties _en route_ of which it would be difficult to acquit you. While as for your National Neurosis, one foreign battery on Primrose Hill would bury it for two generations. It might also blow the roof off Franciscan House. * * * * * "But poor Reggie can't do anything by himself," says Esther. "They all say that," I grumble. "And haven't you been just a little bit rude?" "I'm attacking a point of view," I explain, "and I feel rather heated." She looks over my shoulder reproachfully. "And you've never even _mentioned_ our having the baby when they take the 'Nautilus' to Italy." "No more I have." "And it's the very thing I told you to write about." And this is true. For we _must_ have the baby. Yr. sorrowful friend, P. H. P.S.--This letter almost makes me wonder why I like you. XXIII _To Miss Sarah Harding, The Orphanage, Little Blessington, Dorset._ 91B HARLEY STREET, W., _September_ 6, 1910. MY DEAR SALLY, There was a young American, Stephen Crane, who wrote, a few years ago, a little volume called "Wounds in the Rain." You may have read it. It was rather a grim book, but written with a good deal of power, and a promise of more to come that the author, alas, never lived to fulfil. And not the worst part of it was its title, with its suggestion of grey suffering, the aftermath alike of victory and defeat. And yet I am not sure that "Wounds in the Sun" would not literally have stood for a far greater sum of misery. Only he would never have made us feel it. For there's an implicit sadness in the monosyllable rain--in the very sound of it--that depends, I think, when you come to analyse it, less upon the ideas of water and wetness and possible chill that it conjures up, than upon an underlying suggestion of something falling. It's a little hard to account for it--I would commend the subject to a metaphysician if I could be certain that it hasn't already been dealt with by him--and yet it's a fact, I think, that we have invested all falling things with a certain quality of tragedy, with at any rate no single idea of cheerfulness. Think of what you will, from little Susan's tear to Lucifer, son of the Morning, and of all the more material phenomena that lie between them--cascades, avalanches, autumn leaves--and you will find that while your vision perceives in them pity, or solemnity, or terror, or even disgust, it clothes no falling thing with actual joy. And the swifter the fall the more profound are these sentiments that it engenders.