What a plague to us our friend's reticence can be! No one can well have suffered more from it than I with Iris throughout that time--she, so well versed in that unselfish philosophy of trusting but never burdening a friend; an unselfishness a little unfair to the friend, I think, for he is crowned with friendship's laurels without ever being allowed to pay for them with service. But such was Iris, with her philosophy of barricades.... "No one," said she, "can ever really help one, except, of course, in fetching one a taxi and the like. No one can ever help one to do the odd jobs of the heart and mind. It isn't to be expected. One must work out everything for oneself. There's no real help from outside, it must all come to us from ourselves--though when and how, for I've had mighty little of it." But I suppose she was right in choosing her own language of silence. For one doesn't, as she said, talk about hell in the Fourth Dimension.... I grew to know quite well enough what it was all about. She could have added nothing to my knowledge but the details of disagreements and the like, which are so often apt to be as mean in repetition as in fact. And she spared me all that at the risk of my impatience--and of much more, she once confided to me later. Dear Iris! How very much good a little more conceit would have done you! you who looked so like an autocrat but never ceased to wonder at the admiration men paid you.... It was Roger Poole who mainly perplexed me. A particular conceit of mine, in fact, received now a sharp rebuff; for, owing to my long familiarity with them, it was always with something of inner superiority that I had listened to any mention of Poole extravagances, thinking that I had measured the brothers with some profundity--to discover now that I had known nothing but the outward complexion of anyway one of them! How could one view him squarely?