Stella has a retroussé nose and the most adorable smile. We have thousands of things in common, besides a love of dancing. She says she doesn’t want an engagement ring, she would much rather have a deer-hound, so I am trying to get one. I wonder if anybody breeds them in your neighbourhood? Father wants me to go to Oxford, just as if there had been no War, but I don’t feel that I could possibly endure the restrictions there. Besides, what would Stella do? During the War she worked too, for all kinds of Charities. She was splendid. When you feel well enough, you must let me bring her down to play and sing to you.—Your affectionate nephew, ROY LXXIII VERENA RABY TO RICHARD HAVEN DEAR RICHARD,—Some of your special privileges seem to be coming my way, for I am now largely occupied in writing letters of counsel, chiefly to nephews and nieces in whom the fever of love burns or does not burn. Theodore’s girl is the last—so very much a child of the moment as to think that wanting a thing and having it should be synonymous. I am feeling very grateful I am not a mother and I felicitate with you on your non-paternity. Parents just now are anything but enviable. None the less.... It’s funny how the young people come to me for help, just as though I were a flitting Cupid instead of a weary stationary horizontal middle-aged female, whose only traffic in the emotions occurred in the dim and distant past and is for ever buried.—Good night, V. LXXIV NICHOLAS DEVOSE TO VERENA RABY MY DEAR SERENA,—If I may call you again by that name, which to me, in spite of everything, is sacred still—I have only just had, from my sister, the news of your illness, having in this far spot few letters from home, and I write at once to say that I am deeply grieved and hope that already you are better. If you can bring yourself to write, or to send a message by another hand, I implore you to do so. You may think it hard that it needed a serious injury to occur to you before I wrote again, but that would not necessarily convict me of callousness. I swear to you, Serena, that not a day has passed without my thinking of you—and always with the tenderest devotion to you and always with self-reproach and regret that, so largely through my fault, or, even more, my own impossible temperament, your life may have been circumscribed and rendered less happy.