I wish you would write to nurse to say that I needn’t have cod liver oil. A telegram would be better and I will pay you back for it out of my money box.
Uncle Hugh has sent Cyril a toy theatre and we are going to do Midsummer Night’s Dream which Daddy says was by bacon. He won’t tell us what he means.
When you come home you will find a surprise in the garden. I mean you will if it comes up. We have sown Welcome in mignonette in the bed under your sitting-room window but there are such lots of slugs that we can’t count on it.
Daddy says that he is much more important than Aunt Verena.—Your loving
Tony
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CVII
Nicholas Devose to Verena Raby
My Dearest Serena,—I am sending a selection, and an easel with them. I suggest that you adopt the Japanese custom and change them periodically. The Japanese make each picture the King of the Wall for a week or so in turn, but I should like you to have a fresh one of my drawings on the easel every day—for the whole day. That is, of course, if you like them. I cannot tell you how happy I am to be allowed to do this. I feel that I am again in your life, but with perfect safety: vicariously, so to speak, but with the fullest fidelity too. Let some one advise me of safe arrival. I am sending you sixty picked things—so you must be well again in sixty days! But I daresay that if you did the picking you would make a totally different choice. One of the tragic things in an artist’s life—and I don’t mean by artist only a painter—is the tendency of people to admire what he thinks his least worthy efforts.