MY DEAR, your question about the tippling medico is not an easy one to answer. How could he take money if he is a man with any pride? The thing becomes a bribe, and bribes are rather offensive. It is also on the cards that what he needs to pull him together is not your money, but just the jolt which expulsion from Malvern would give him. He might then make an effort and start afresh among patients who are really ill and in need of a doctor—panel work, for example. Somehow, I don’t like interference in this kind of case. There is always the chance, too, that teetotalism might make him self-righteous and injure his character in other ways, perhaps more undesirably than alcohol. That’s how I feel. On the other hand, expulsion from Malvern might be the means of sending him wholly to the devil. His self-respect would be lost and he would sink lower and lower. In this case the burden would fall chiefly on his wife, for with the complete loss of self-respect there can come to the loser a certain peace of mind; the struggle is over; whereas she would suffer in two ways—through grief and through poverty. There’s no fairness in the world. The Gods may, as Edgar says, be just in making of our pleasant vices whips to scourge us, but there is no justice in including the innocent in this castigation—as always happens. Your best way is to be ready to do what you can for the wife. The League of Nations continues to engage attention; but if I were building a house I should build it underground. War can never be eliminated, and it is certain in the future to be waged chiefly in the air and without warning. It is probably high time to turn our scaffold poles into spades. I send you to-day two short poems from the East. Although written hundreds and hundreds of years ago by Chinese poets, they touch the spot to-day:— Sir, from my dear old home you come, And all its glories you can name; Oh, tell me,—has the winter-plum Yet blossomed o’er the window frame? And this:— You ask when I’m coming: alas! not just yet ... How the rain filled the pools on that night when we met! Oh, when shall we ever snuff candles again, And recall the glad hours of that evening of rain? —What is the special charm of those? But they haunt me.—Good night, R. H. LXXXVI VERENA RABY TO RICHARD HAVEN DEAR RICHARD,—You were very good to reply so quickly about poor Blanche’s husband. I wish other people were as prompt and true to their word. Dr. Else must now, I suppose, gang the gait that the stars have prescribed for him; but of course one has to remember that my interference might be also in the stellar programme.