From Ballycastle my husband wrote to Mrs. Janvier:
6th Aug., 1899.
... We are glad to get away from Belfast, tho’ very glad to be there, in a nice hotel, after our fatigues and 10 hours’ exposure in the damp sea-fog. It was a lovely day in Belfast, and Elizabeth had her first experience of an Irish car.
We are on the shore of a beautiful bay—with the great ram-shaped headland of Fair Head on the right, the Atlantic in front, and also in front but leftward the remote Gaelic island of Rathlin. It is the neighbourhood whence Deirdrê and Naois fled from Concobar, and it is from a haven in this coast that they sailed for Scotland. It is an enchanted land for those who dream the old dreams: though perhaps without magic or even appeal for those who do not....”
October found us at Chorleywood, in rooms overlooking the high common. Thence he wrote to Mr. Murray Gilchrist:
My dear Robert,
It is a disappointment to us both that you are not coming south immediately. Yes; the war-news saddens one, and in many ways. Yet, the war was inevitable: of that I am convinced, apart from political engineering or financial interests. There are strifes as recurrent and inevitable as tidal waves. Today I am acutely saddened by the loss of a very dear friend, Grant Allen. I loved the man—and admired the brilliant writer and catholic critic and eager student. He was of a most winsome nature. The world seems shrunken a bit more. As yet, I cannot realise I am not to see him again. Our hearts ache for his wife—an ideal loveable woman—a dear friend of us both.
We are both very busy. Elizabeth has now the artwork to do for a London paper as well as for The Glasgow Herald. For myself, in addition to a great complication of work on hand I have undertaken (for financial reasons) to do a big book on the Fine Arts in the Nineteenth Century. I hope to begin on it Monday next. It is to be about 125,000 words, (over 400 close-printed pp.), and if possible is to be done by December-end!...
You see I am not so idle as you think me. It is likely that our friend Miss Macleod will have a new book out in January or thereabouts—but not fiction. It is a volume of ‘Spiritual Essays’ etc.—studies in the spiritual history of the Gael.
We like this most beautiful and bracing neighbourhood greatly: and as we have pleasant artist-friends near, and are so quickly and easily reached from London, we are as little isolated as at So. Hampstead—personally, I wish we were more! It has been the loveliest October I remember for years. The equinoxial bloom is on every tree. But today, after long drought, the weather has broken, and a heavy rain has begun.