There had been some discussion, as it seems, of English and of American fiction, of the younger men coming on in the two literatures. One of the visitors innocently inquired of Mr. Blackthorne whether he knew of your work. Instantly all noticed a change in his manner: plainly the subject was distasteful, and he put it away from him with some vague rejoinder in a curt undertone. At once some one of the visitors conceived the idea of getting at the reason for Mr. Blackthorne's unaccountable hostility. But his evident resolve was not to be drawn out. As they strolled through the garden, they paused to admire his collection of ferns, and he impulsively turned to the American who had been questioning him and pointed to a little spot. "That," he said, "was once reserved for some ferns which your young American novelist promised to send me." The whole company gathered curiously about the spot and all naturally asked, "But where are the ferns?" Mr. Blackthorne without a word and with an air of regret that even so little had escaped him, led the party further away. That is all. Perhaps that is what you hear in the Club: the hum of the hive that a member should have acted in some disagreeable, unaccountable way toward a very great man whose work so many of us revere. You have merely run into the universal instinct of human nature to think evil of human nature. Emerson had about as good an opinion of it as any man that ever lived, and he called it a scoundrel. It is one of the greatest of mysteries that we are born with a poor opinion of one another and begin to show it as babies. If you do not think that babies despise one another, put a lot of them together for a few hours and see how much good opinion is left. I feel bound to say that your letter is most unbridled. There cannot be many things with which the people of Kentucky are more familiar than the bridle, yet they always impress outsiders as the most unbridled of Americans. I _will_ add, however, that patrician blood, ancestral blood, is always unbridled. Otherwise I might not now be styled the Nestor of this Club. Only some kind of youthful Hector in this world ever makes one of its aged Nestors. I am interrupted again.... I must conclude my letter rather abruptly. My advice to you is not to pay the slightest attention to all this miserable gossip in the Club. I am too used to that sort of thing here to notice it myself. And will you not at an early date give me the pleasure of your company at dinner? Faithfully yours, RUFUS KENT. PART THIRD CLARA LOUISE CHAMBERLAIN TO BEVERLEY SANDS _Seminole, North Carolina, May 1, 1912_ MY DEAR SIR: