Dear Agatha,--The letter you sent in answer to my wire has remained too long unanswered, but I have, since Katherine's death, been immersed in correspondence of a most uninteresting and tedious description. The work entailed in the settling of affairs is colossal, and when I haven't been writing tiresome business epistles, or others even more tiresome to people who never remembered my existence when I was a poor man, the lawyers have had me in their octopus-like clutches. You will notice that I refer to my poverty in the past tense. Yes, Agatha, I have no longer to consider whether I can afford a glass of ale with my chop for lunch, or half a crown for admission to the pit (to be quite correct, I should say three shillings, the odd sixpence being one's contribution towards the expenses of the war). I can even, if I wish, call a taxi to take me round the corner, or ask Mrs. Darling to dine with me at the Ritz. Katherine left me all she possessed. She did it, I believe, with qualms as to the wisdom of the deed, but, as I have remarked before, "blood is thicker than water," and the habit of giving, where I am concerned, had become with Katherine a habit. Her forebodings, however, were apparent in the wording of her will, and her lawyer treated me to quite a sermon when I called to sign some papers the other day. He said it behoved me to take up the social duties entailed in the possession of a house in Curzon Street, together with an income of five thousand a year. The Countess, he reminded me, had always been very punctilious in the discharge of her obligations as a member of the aristocracy, and it would be an act of ingratitude on my part if I failed to carry on the family traditions. (I wonder if he has, at any time, seen me with Mrs. Darling.) He hinted at the desirability of my settling down with a suitable wife. Mrs. Darling, by the way, has already had her say on this subject, putting it a little more crudely, and with a rather unflattering reference to "Old Parr". By the way, she refuses absolutely to go any more jaunts round London with me. She says if I don't know my place, she knows hers, and that she has no ambition to "git into the papers". She added that there had been a man with a camera hanging about the Mews lately, and she shouldn't wonder if he wasn't waiting to snapshot the heir to the Countess of Corbridge's thousands.