I stuck it for two days and then I made an excuse and came away. And now, what do you think I’m doing? I’m a railway porter. I carry people’s luggage at Paddington and tell them when the train starts for Thingumbob—if ever it does—and what time the train comes in from Stick-in-the-mud. I was going to Ireland to fish and try to forget—Clemency told me of a place called Curragh Lake—but the strike came and put the lid on that for the moment. The joke is that the old ladies all want to know what lord I am—as the papers have given them the idea that at Paddington there are only noblemen helping.—Your broken-hearted ROY CXLVIII RICHARD HAVEN TO VERENA RABY MY DEAR VERENA, I think that we may all feel happier than we were doing. Even if Old England stands not quite where she did, the bulldog breed is not extinct. The way in which the nation has taken the railway trouble, and the lightning efficiency of the food distributing arrangements, should put dismay into enemy hearts—and under the word enemy I include Allies and rivals—and renew our own individual and corporate ambition and national spirit. In that way the Strike may be said to have been a blessing in disguise, although industrially it has been a calamity. It may also make people look a little more narrowly at their pence, which is what we shall all have to do before long. The oddest things happened, not the least of which I heard of yesterday, when one of the few K.C.’s whom it is my privilege to know showed me on his watch chain the shilling which had been given him, in his capacity as a porter at Victoria, by his butcher, all unconscious of his identity, as a tip for helping with the family luggage on their return from the South Coast. The K.C. said nothing at the time, except Thank you, but when things are a little quieter he is going to show it to his purveyor of indifferent Peace-time joints and enjoy a good laugh with him. I have been wondering if alms-houses for the rich are not more important than for the poor. On all sides I hear of old widowed ladies who, needing homes, or companions, spend their time in visiting one married daughter or married son after another, when they would be far happier in a little colony like Hampton Court. Couldn’t you do something for them? But you would have to be very careful. If any suspicion of charity got about, the whole scheme would fail. So you could not put them together, even in the most exquisite little garden-village homes. They would have to be isolated. At what point in the social scale a necessitous old lady ceases to be willing to have her necessity known, I cannot say; but certainly those who suffer most from it would least like it published. Old gentlemen don’t mind becoming Brothers of the Charterhouse, but what about their Sisters? I doubt it. Only therefore by the exercise of great secrecy could you benefit them.