She wrote Bliss Hobart as school-girlish and impulsive a note as one could imagine, setting forth her gray angel theories in superlative fashion, even underlining and putting exclamation points in pairs and punctuating sentences by a wriggling up and down mark which she said he was to consider as “a grin.” “Of course you’ll be rushed to death when this reaches you,” she concluded, “but you must hear me out. Remember, I listened to all you told me! Never could I spend all that money for myself nor in a sense would it be right. Miss Clergy should have lived down her disappointment, married and raised her boys to fight and her girls to wait and serve. Why should I, stranger that I am, use the money for personal pleasures? I will not even buy a bankrupt title with it.” Here she drew a very large “grin” mark. “I am buying all the deserted lake houses—we have begun negotiations for them and together with the Fincherie there will be a little city of ex-soldiers learning new trades, forgetting empty sleeves and wheel-chair means of travelling, shell shock, snagged souls—all the wilful things which prevent settling down to every day living. “It seems to me, Bliss Hobart, it will always be up to one-tenth of the world to look after the other nine-tenths—so this enterprise will not end as the tapping of crutches dies away. The soldiers must, of necessity, come first. But there is to be a permanent ‘practical art’ colony there—to teach all who need to be taught the thing best fitted for him—or her. (Grin mark.) There are to be ‘hers’! “Life may be shorn of fineries and extravagances and it may be simple—but it need never be sordid and unendurable and that is what I shall try to prove. My heart is set on having flower beds of deep, purple violets and mignonette for the lawns, sun dials with comforting mottoes—there will be a task—the carving of them. I want the one before the Fincherie itself to read: “‘And as our years do run apace, Let us love God And live in peace.’ “Do you like it? (Grin mark.) “I shall have huge, copper lanterns to light the roads at night, there must be yellow ivy and gorse about the walls and cool, gray lavender as a background for pink ramblers and yellow tea roses and, oh, gray angel, I must have a wind screen of willows. I shall build a great archway in the middle of the estate and a stone fence encircling it all. Over the archway I want a thick, oak slab with this motto cut in by a master hand: ‘God gave them a great thing to do—and they did it.’