What I think I most want is advice as to the disposition of money after I am dead. I suppose I ought to be giving it to my own needy relations while I am alive. There is poor Letitia, for one. That husband of hers does nothing to add to his pension, and I know she is in need of all kinds of things. Roy is on my mind too. Not that his father is not well off, but fathers and sons so often fail to understand each other, and I feel sure that the boy, if helped a little, might become serious and develop into a self-supporting man. At present he seems to do nothing but fall in and out of love. I do not intend to blame him for that, but I should like to see more stability. He sends me the fullest account of his young ladies, each of whom is perfect in turn. How lovely to be young and absurd and not ashamed of inconstancy! As we grow older we acquire such stupid cautions. V. LXXXVII RICHARD HAVEN TO VERENA RABY Look here, Verena, I wish you wouldn’t say fulsome things about my promptness and so forth. My promptness is sheer self-indulgence, to prevent the bore of accumulated correspondence. As for my sagacity, don’t be so sure about it. You may be taken in by my brevity and the confidence of it all; and I may be utterly wrong about everything. Why not? Meanwhile, I have to remark that either everything is in the stellar programme (as you so happily call Fate) or nothing is. If your suggested interference with the bibulous proclivities of Dr. Else is written there, so is my dissuasion of you. If you are bent upon some form of corruption—bribing people into Virtue—why not try it with the young? There’s Roy, as you say, all ready to be an ass. Might not he allow his life to be regulated by the promise of “A Gift for a Good Boy”? Not long ago some rich man left his son a fortune on condition that he never approached within a certain fixed distance—several miles—of Piccadilly Circus. It got into the papers, I remember. How it can be known whether or not these conditions are observed I have no notion. I trust it does not mean ceaseless tracking by private detectives. But there is always a certain fascination about them and I wonder that dramatists have not done more with the idea. Personally I think I hate such tampering with destiny, fortunate or ill, but you must do as you wish with your own. Besides, as I said before, it is probably as much your fate to set up obstacles to Roy’s folly as it is his to be foolish. We only play at free will.