I hope the summer's end finds you still out of the streets, and that it has all been a comfortable chapter. I hear of it from my brother as the Great Cool Time, which makes for me a pleasant image, since I generally seem to sear my eyeballs, from June to September, when I steal a glance, across the sea, at the bright American picture. Here, of course, we have been as grey and cold, as "braced" and rheumatic and uncomfortable as you please. But that has little charm of novelty—though (not to blaspheme) we have, since I've been living here, occasionally perspired. I live here, as you see, still, and am by this time, like the dyer's hand, subdued to what I work in, or at least try to economise in. It is pleasant enough, for five or six months of the year, for me to wish immensely that some crowning stroke of fortune may still take the form of driving you over to see me before I fall to pieces. Apropos of which I am forgetting what has been half my reason—no, not half—for writing to you. Many weeks ago there began to be blown about the world—from what fountain of lies proceeding I know not—a rumour that you were staying with me here, a rumour flaunting its little hour as large as life in some of the London papers. It brought me many notes of inquiry, invitations to you, and other tributes to your glory—damn it! (I don't mean damn your glory, but damn the wanton and worrying rumour). Among other things it brought me a fattish letter addressed to you and which I have been so beastly procrastinating as not to forward you till now, when I post it with this. Its aspect somehow denotes insignificance and impertinence, and I haven't wanted to do it, as a part of the so grossly newspaperistic impudence, too much honour; besides, verily, the intention day after day of writing you at the same time. Well, there it all is. You will think my letter as long as my book. So I add only my benediction, as ever, on your house, beginning with Mrs. Howells, going straight through, and ramifying as far as you permit me.
Yours, my dear Howells, always and ever,
HENRY JAMES.
To H. G. Wells.
Lamb House, Rye.
September 23rd, 1902.
My dear Wells,
All's well that ends well and everything is to hand. I thank you heartily for the same, and I have read the Two Men, dangling breathlessly at the tail of their tub while in the air and plying them with indiscreet questions while out of it. It is, the whole thing, stupendous, but do you know what the main effect of it was on my cheeky consciousness? To make me sigh, on some such occasion, to collaborate with you, to intervene in the interest of—well, I scarce know what to call it: I must wait to find the right name when we meet. You can so easily avenge yourself by collaborating with me! Our mixture would, I think, be effective. I hope you are thinking of doing Mars—in some detail. Let me in there, at the right moment—or in other words at an early stage. I really shall, opportunity serving, venture to try to say two or three things to you about the Two Men—or rather not so much about them as about the cave of conceptions whence they issue. All I can say now however is that the volume goes like a bounding ball, that it is 12.30 a.m., and that I am goodnightfully yours,
HENRY JAMES.
To Mrs. Cadwalader Jones.
Dictated.
Lamb House, Rye.
October 23d, 1902.