Lamb House, Rye.
Sept: 2nd, 1913.

My dearest of all Howards,

I long so for news of you that nothing but this act of aggression will serve, and that even though I know (none better!) what a heavy, not to say intolerable overburdening of illness is the request that those even too afflicted to feed themselves shall feed the post with vivid accounts of themselves. But though I don't in the least imagine that you are not feeding yourself (I hope very regularly and daintily,) this is all the same an irresistible surrender to sentiments of which you are the loved object—downright crude affection, fond interest, uncontrollable yearning. Look you, it isn't a request for anything, even though I languish in the vague—it's just a renewed "declaration"—of dispositions long, I trust familiar to you and which my uncertainty itself makes me want, for my relief, to reiterate. A vagueish (which looks like agueish, but let the connection particularly forbid!) echo of you came to me shortly since from Rhoda Broughton—more or less to the effect that she believed you to be still in Scotland and still nurse-ridden (which is my rude way of putting it;) and this she took for not altogether significant of your complete recovery of ease. However, she is on occasion a rich dark pessimist—which is always the more picturesque complexion; and she may that day but have added a more artful touch to her cheek. I decline to believe that you are not rising by gentle stages to a fine equilibrium unless some monstrous evidence crowds upon me. I have myself little by little left such a weight of misery behind me—really quite shaken off, though ever so slowly, the worst of it, that slowness is to me no unfavouring argument at all, nor is the fact of fluctuations a thing to dismay. One goes unutterably roundabout, but still one goes—and so it is I have come. To where I am, I mean; which is doubtless where I shall more or less stay. I can do with it, for want of anything grander—and it's comparative peace and ease. It isn't what I wish you—for I wish and invoke upon you the superlative of these benedictions, and indeed it would give me a good shove on to the positive myself to know that your comparative creeps quietly forward. Don't resent creeping—there's an inward joy in it at its best that leaping and bounding don't know. And I'm sure you are having it—even if you still only creep—at its best. I live snail-like here, and it's from my modest brown shell that I reach, oh dearest Howard, ever so tenderly forth to you. I am having—absit omen!—a very decent little summer. My quite admirable niece Peggy has been with me for some weeks; she is to be so some three more, and her presence is most soothing and supporting. (I can't stand stiff solitude in the large black doses I once could.) ...

But good-night and take all my blessing—all but a scrap for William. Yours, dearest Howard, so very fondly,

H. J.

To Mrs. G. W. Prothero.

The "young man from Texas" was Mr. Stark Young, who had appealed to Mrs. Prothero for guidance in the study of H. J.'s books. H. J. was amused by the request, of which Mrs. Prothero told him, and immediately wrote the following.

Rye.
Sept 14th, 1913.

This, please, for the delightful young man from Texas, who shews such excellent dispositions. I only want to meet him half way, and I hope very much he won't think I don't when I tell him that the following indications as to five of my productions (splendid number—I glory in the tribute of his appetite!) are all on the basis of the Scribner's (or Macmillan's) collective and revised and prefaced edition of my things, and that if he is not minded somehow to obtain access to that form of them, ignoring any others, he forfeits half, or much more than half, my confidence. So I thus amicably beseech him—! I suggest to give him as alternatives these two slightly different lists:

1. Roderick Hudson.
2. The Portrait of a Lady.
3. The Princess Casamassima.
4. The Wings of the Dove.
5. The Golden Bowl.
—
1. The American.
2. The Tragic Muse.
3. The Wings of the Dove.
4. The Ambassadors.
5. The Golden Bowl.