Dear STIEGLITZ: Your letter was the most welcome thing that has come to me in these last two weeks since you left, however late and partial my response may seem to be. You should have heard from me much before this if I hadn’t been neck high in writing some climacterics for my _Bridge_ poem. That simply carried me out of myself and all personal interests from the dot of five until two in the morning sometimes--for several days during which I was extremely happy. Those were also the very days when I wanted most to write you,--paradoxically as it sounds, I _was_, of course, for you and I meet on the same platform in our best and most impersonal moods,--SO, I’ve been with you very much. The thing which hurts me now that I have the time to write letters, is that I not only have left the creative currents that would have prompted me to better statements than I am usually equal to,--but also that I’m in a low state of reactions towards everything, following an evening with Mr. J----. Malice seems to settle inertly but very positively in some people, and as he is somehow attached to several really fine friends of mine whose company I would hate to forego on such account, I suppose I must learn to face this little clown with better results. So far, I can only say that wine is no ally against such odds. It even turns to vinegar! and that is much less pleasing than pure water. I don’t need to say any more to you about this man, his vacant mind, vague eyes and empty hands. We’ve given that enough attention. I rant here merely because I have been cheated (willy-nilly) of pouring out a clearer cup today, as I had planned. I, in the end, am really the one to blame. When I say that I welcomed your letter it doesn’t mean that I was unconcerned enough with its testament of pain and accident not to think about you and your situation many hours. What the details of those matters were certainly would not help me to realize any the better that you have been going through a very tumultuous period and that it has been very fortunate that you should arrive in the country when you did, not that you escaped them,--but that you were able to _see_ them more tranquilly. The city is a place of “brokenness,” of drama; but when a certain development in this intensity is reached a new stage is created, or must be, arbitrarily, or there is a foreshortening, a loss and a premature disintegration of experience. You are setting the keynote now for a higher tranquillity than ever. It is an even wider intensity, also. You see, I am writing to you perhaps very egoistically, but you will understand that I am always seeing your life and experience very solidly as a part of my own because I feel our identities so much alike in spiritual direction. When it comes to action we diverge in several ways,--but I’m sure we center in common devotions, in a kind of timeless vision.