You _are_ a good sort, and I am awfully grateful to you. Your letters never fail me each month as the mail comes in, and you send me just the papers and books I like to see in my isolation. I have been here over six months and am getting rather weary of the office work. I don’t suppose there is much chance of my being promoted to the principal post if Sir James Eccles does not come back. It would be too rapid a promotion and excite frightful jealousy—though I really think I should do as well as any one else, and better than some. My Arabic and Persian are both useful to me here, and I have worked up Hindustani and mastered Swahili and get along very well with the Arabs and the big colony of British Indians. But I don’t feel confident about F.O. approval. All these affairs pass through Bennet Molyneux’s hands, and he does not like me for some reason, probably because he’s an obstinate ass and hates being set right. I hoped Lord Silchester would have pushed me more, but according to Sibyl’s letters he seems really ailing and to care about little besides his own health. Your account of your visit to Englefield last summer amused me very much. Sibyl has a good deal of the cat about her, but I quite understand from the very oppositeness of your dispositions you might get on very well—your straightforwardness and her guile. At any rate though I am a little sore still about her throwing me over for Silchester, I am ready to forgive her if she is nice to my one dear sister. As to _you_, I never properly appreciated you till I came to live out here. If I could only get a settled position I think I should ask you to come and keep house for me. I daresay I shall never marry—the women I have felt drawn to have always married somebody else. It would do father good if he had to engage a housekeeper and a curate. He throws away far too much of the money he ought to leave some day to you on excavations at Silchester. Well, as I say, I am getting rather tired of the office work I have to plough through day after day. There is endless litigation between the Hindu merchants and the Arabs. There are Slave cases every week and frequent squabbles with the French Consulate over slaving ships flying the French flag. And although I have a "legal" vice-consul to help me, his decisions are sometimes awfully rotten and have to be revised.