The world is too much with me, Charles, but all the same I've just ordered a flannel suit which will make Castle Bumpbrook stare. Sort of purplish; and it makes up very smart, and they can do me two pairs of trousers in it, whatever that means. I should have thought they could have done me as many pairs as I liked to ask for, but it seems not. They only print a limited edition, and then destroy the original plates, so that nobody else can walk about looking like me. I asked the man if he thought it would play croquet well, and he said, yes. By the way, I have learnt some more about croquet since I wrote last. First, then, you can go round in one, if you're frightfully good. I should like to go round in one; I suppose that would be the record? Secondly, if you're wired from all the balls, "so that you can't get a clear shot at every part of any one of them," you go into baulk, and have another turn. This must happen pretty often, because you could never have a clear shot at the back of a ball, unless you went right round the world the other way, and that would be too risky, besides wasting so much time. No, I can see there's a lot to learn in the game, but patience, Charles, patience. I shall go round in one yet. VI DEAR CHARLES,--Are you coming up to town this month? If you do we will make a journey into Shepherd's Bush together, and see the Exhibition. I am afraid I have been doing Shepherd's Bush an injustice all these years. John and I once arranged a system of seven hells, in which we put all the men we hated. Nobody known personally to either of us was eligible (so your name never came up, dear Charles), which meant that they had to be filled with people in the public eye. The seventh division contained two only: one a socialist, who is thought a good deal of--by himself, I mean; the other a novelist who only writes about superior people who drop their "g's." The punishment for this class was simple; perpetual life in an open boat on a choppy sea, smoking Virginian cigarettes--John's idea chiefly, he being a bad sailor. The doom decreed for the unfortunates in the fifth class--now I am coming to the point of this reminiscence--was more subtle: they had to live at Shepherd's Bush, and go to a musical comedy every afternoon.