I have never felt so mortified with myself as when on the occasion of a public dinner given to us, in conjunction I think, in New York, you, speaking first, talked of my work with such enthusiasm and such enviable generosity--for to know how to be so generous is a thing for which one may well be envied!--that I was covered with confusion and quite literally had the tears in my eyes. I was indeed so affected as to be totally unable to make any adequate reply and must have seemed curmudgeonly in the extreme to our audience. And then, subsequently during a tour of lectures at the English Classes of certain American Universities, I found that you had spoken of me already to them with the same magnificent generosity, so that I understood that it was your praise of my work that had actually secured me the invitation to deliver those lectures--why, then I conceived towards yourself a warmth of feeling of which you can be only too little aware and I far, far too little able to express. Why should you go out of your way to do these things? I have never done you any service; I have never in that city which for long now has been my spiritual home heard of any other English novelist going out of his way to speak a kind word for any other one, and, that city being the immense whispering gallery that it is, I have heard of many unkind sayings as to my works and much unkinder ones as to my person uttered there in public and private by visiting English novelists. But you just came there and ran about and said in innumerable places the dearest things--dearest to me; just, as the saying is, for the love of God. Because how can you retain enthusiasms for books who must have read so many? I do not think that these things are too private between us to be spoken of. For in the weary business that is the writing of books the sudden discovery of generosities towards oneself by persons hardly personally known to one--it must be twenty-three years or so since, in the old _English Review_ days and a little after we infrequently met until we thus again in Gotham came together--such sudden discoveries of generosities are so refreshing against the dust and the haze of the road that is always uphill that their publication seems almost a duty. For how different might not have been the history of that which I am here tracing had such a sense of the co-operative thing that our art is, distinguished the long line of its practitioners from Cædmon to ... oh, to whom you will! Such a sense as must be yours....