Your beautiful Newport (if Newport I may call it) letter greatly touches and interests me, and the effect of it is enhanced or confirmed by the arrival almost at the same moment of the pale photographic reminder and pale, though not wholly ineffectual, of the monumental composition. All thanks for everything, and most of all for the friendly remembrance that has dictated them. It is a great pleasure, a great pride, for me to possess the dim shadows of the picture, and, shadows though they be, I shall suspend the most substantial on one of my little room-walls, where it will keep constantly in memory for me those too few weeks in Rome, more than two years ago, when I assisted a little at the glorious but difficult birth and since I am afraid I shall never see the great canvas itself in place. And your letter is full of other echoes too and of a further-away past and a prior state, almost, of being; so extremely does your description of your soft grey day in that unforgotten Clime bring the whole place and air and feeling back to me, and transport me to my long-vanished youth, or put it again before me. I am delighted you have so mildly-melancholy a refuge from the rather screwed-up American summer. We read awful things of heat-waves over here, but I hope you successfully oppose them with the waves of the sea, since you suggest that you lead more or less an amphibious life. We have moreover our own heat-waves here, overwhelming enough (the globe surely is being resolved again into its primal ball-of-fire condition), and without any sea-change for _me_, whom salt-water afflicts and distance (the shining sands are 3 miles off) discourages. I greatly regret to hear of your mother’s failure of health; it must be a comfort for you--as such comforts go--to be able to be with her. She must indeed be grand, and above all strongly fortified. May she long, may she subtly, and not too painfully, resist! I venture to send her the benediction of my sincerity. Your best news is that of your possible appearance here at no distant date. Of course Elliott must go back to Rome and of course the chance will come and the situation reconstitute itself. Tell him, please, with my kind regards, that I put up for you both that friendliest prayer. And don’t wait too long; I want to see you there again; and _my_ sands are running low. But I want to see you here too, and I should warmly welcome you.[4] Keep up your heart, dear Maud Elliott, and believe in the extreme constancy of your affectionate old friend _Henry James._ CHAPTER XXII BY THE TIBER AND BY THE CHARLES