My rheumatism has been rather worse lately, but I mustn’t tell you things like that when you are so ill yourself. I should like to know what your doctor says about you. There was a poor lady here who slipped and fell and hurt her back, very much in the same way, I should imagine, and she lived only a few hours. And dear old Sir Benjamin Pike, my father’s friend and fellow magistrate, came to his end in the same way, through a banana skin. I am sure the regulations about throwing banana and orange skins away in the streets should be more strict. In my childhood we never saw bananas at all, and now they are everywhere. How odd it is that fashions in fruit should change as well as fashions in bodies and in dress, although I for one am against so much change in dress and think the advertisements in the weekly papers are dreadful in their incitement to women to spend money, especially now when the Prime Minister tells us we should all save, and I am sure he is right. And the money people gave for pearls too, at the Red Cross sale! Perfectly marvellous where it all comes from, and how different we all are! Those millionaires buying pearls for their wives, and me here quite happy with the mosaic brooch my father brought me from Venice and the agate clasp which belonged to dear mother. I must stop now or I shall miss the post.—Always your loving friend, LOUISA XXVII RICHARD HAVEN TO VERENA RABY MY DEAR, how odd it is that even the sweetest-natured men, when asked for a fairy tale for the young, tend to satire. Pure fancy—comic invention with no _arrière pensée_—seems to be the most evasive medium. That mathematical genius, W. K. Clifford, could do the genuine thing without one drop of the gall of sophistication, and so, of course, could Lewis Carroll, and Burne-Jones in his letters. But when I asked my old friend, George Demain, for something amusing and suitable for a children’s amateur magazine, look at what he sent! I enclose the original, which please return. As it is no part of my scheme of life to teach cynicism, I am withholding it from the fledgling editors. I don’t mind meeting cynics (although it is always best that there should be but one in any company) but I don’t intend consciously to make any. One of the extraordinary things of the moment is how little some men who went through the War were changed by it all. In fact, it comes to this, that the War could deal only with what a man had: it could not create brains or feelings. The people who talk about it as a purge, an educator, as discipline and so forth, are saying what they thought it ought to have been, rather than what it was. There are clerks in my office who enlisted and fought and even killed men, and have now returned to be clerks again, with perfect resignation, and with no outward sign of development, except that they do their work with less care.