To Leslie Stephen.
Casa Verda,
Tafira.
17 Jan. 1903.
The news that we get of you out here is satisfactory rather than satisfying—I mean that we have heard little, but it was all to the good. The last intelligence takes you back to your home and I feel good reason for hoping that long before now you have become reasonably comfortable. What I wish you know.
All here goes well. I am having a supremely good time—the only pains are those given by my conscience or by the voice that exists where my conscience should be—but the remedies for moral twinges are not difficult to come by in this world of sin—which also is (locally) a world of corrupting sunshine.
I brought with me this time all the three supplementary volumes of Dict. Natl. Biog. I stare at them and wonder how anybody can have the energy to make such things. Even novels strike me as laborious productions when the sun is at its best.
We have been having rain: and when it rains here you find that the roof of your house has been surprised by the performance. I am now engaged in drying a boxful of copied Year Book which unfortunately was left beneath a weak point in the ceiling. Is it "ceiling" by the way? I don't know, and while I am in the garden the dictionary is in the house and I don't care a perrita (primarily little bitch but also a five centimo piece) how this or any other word spells itself; and all this I ascribe to the sun.
It will be a good day when I get a postcard signed L. S.—but don't be in a hurry to send one before the spirit moves you.
Back at Hobbes again? I hope so. Florence joins me in hopes—as you can well suppose.
Yours very affectionately,
F. W. Maitland.