really no cafe life here or factory or shop life worth mentioning. Thousands of clerks pour out of government offices at night and eat and go to the movies. The streets are beautiful with many parks, etc., but it is all rather dead. I am really more interested in the soldiers and sailors that one meets than anything else. They have a strange psychology of their own that is new to me. This sounds bad, and perhaps it is so,--but what should one do with the reported example of our new VICE -- -- -- -- scenting the air as it does. From what I’m hearing, about every other person in the government service and diplomatic service are enlarged editions of Lord Douglas. Amusing Household! as Rimbaud would say. I shall look for _The Rainbow_ in Brentano’s here, and hope that it may be interesting. -- -- -- -- 49: TO GORHAM MUNSON [_Washington_] _Oct. 1 ’20_ Dear Gorham: --/--/ New York seems to be set for a fine musical and dramatic season. I took in _Footloose_ here last week and enjoyed it in spite of many obvious impossibilities of situation, etc. Emily Stevens did well in it--I suppose it would have failed without her. _Stepping Stones_ is here this week and I may go to see it. -- -- -- -- What think you of this Aldous Huxley’s “Leda” poems? They strike me as dry and very clever,--but is real poetry so obviously clever? Modern life and its vacuity seems to me to be responsible for such work. There is only a lime or a lemon to squeeze or a pepper-pot left to shake. All the same I admire his work very much. He comes in the line of Eliot and Sitwell. Eliot’s influence threatens to predominate the new English. 50: TO GORHAM MUNSON _Washington, D.C._ _Oct. 20th,--’20_ Dear Gorham: --/--/ Your letter that arrived this morning had the true rage of the celibate unwilling in it. I sympathize with you.... My nights are uneasy also. But you ought to pity me more than yourself,--my satisfactions are far more remote and dangerous than yours, and my temptations frequent, alas! I have just been reading your Pollard article, and on bringing it to the attention of my friend Wilbur Underwood here, was delighted to find that U. knew Pollard very well, the latter having been enthusiastic about the two vols. of verse that Underwood brought out in England a long time ago. What pathos there is in these sudden flashes on forgotten people, forgotten achievements and encounters! Here is this man, Underwood, with the beauty and promise of his life all dried and withered by the daily grind he has had to go through year after year in the State Dept. with a meagre salary. A better critic and more interesting person one seldom meets, yet the routine of uninteresting work has probably killed forever his creative predispositions. A very few friends is all that life holds for him. Yes, Pound is right in what he says in his “The Rest,”--“O helpless few in my country, O remnant enslaved!... You who cannot wear yourselves out by persisting to successes.”