And again he wrote:
So glad to hear the operation has been successful. Congratulate her from me. Tell her I heartily wish I were in her place as to this, but that nevertheless I have not 'lost heart.' I am now certainly stronger, and if I could only submit my cranial cavity to Tom's[121] hands for removal of anything disagreeable, I should be comparatively joyful.
The weather is glorious. Marian is at mass, having read me one of Church's sermons.
Please tell John to send me a couple of hundred cigarettes (to prevent influenza!).
When you come out you will not find me a kill-joy; the danger will rather be that of my scandalising you all by riotous conduct on Sunday.
And certainly he was astonishingly bright when his wife returned to him. It was on a Sunday afternoon, and his first proposition was, 'The church bell is tinkling, let's go to church.' It was the twenty-eighth of January, and the brightness and gladness of two of the Evening Psalms were oddly appropriate, and chimed in with feelings of a greater gladness dawning on him, for he was leaving the strange land in which for years he had not been able to sing 'The Lord's Song.'
And then began a time, often saddened by hours of intense physical exhaustion and physical depression, but also of what can only be called growth in holiness, in all that comes from nearness to God.
In the early autumn and winter there had been sad moments when still the clouds of darkness, of inability to grasp the Hand of God stretched out to meet him, hung over him, but in these months there had been the same growth.
One to whom he often spoke of the deepest things of life and of death will never forget his saying one day just after the attack of illness in December: 'I have come to see that cleverness, success, attainment, count for little; that goodness, or, as F. (naming a dear friend) would say, "character," is the important factor in life.'