Should you happen, he writes, 14.4.21, to buy a steam-yacht, in addition to a motor-car, before the 5th of May, you might send her for us: we would as soon travel that way, land at the Temple stairs and lunch with you while the yacht takes our luggage up-river to Chelsea....
You have evidently misunderstood my motives in deciding to buy a car, I began to explain.
Get a neat, unobstrusive disk with “Hackney Carriage” fitted to it, he interposed: you can make a tidy income out of your car then, when the Muse (should I say the Garage?) fails you.
... If, he writes, 19.4.21, you have not blewed or blued (which is it?) your last fiver, consider whether your library is really complete without the Greville Memoirs. Strachey’s book will probably have set you lusting for them.
They contain the original story about “speaking disrespectfully of the Equator.”...
I send you the second edition of Harris’ life of Oscar. You have already read the first edition. But you will like to see such things, if any, in the appendix as may be new and certainly Shaw’s contribution to the end....
I had the misfortune to offend Teixeira by quoting a passage from Sir James Frazer’s Golden Bough:
I save my temper, he writes, 22.4.21, by not discussing religion except with Catholics or politics except with liberals. There’s room for discussion in the nuances, there’s too much room for it with those who call my black white. I never dispute the goodness of certain infidels nor the wickedness of many of the faithful. What I hate is the smug-smiling affectation of superiority displayed by the agnostics....
Huxley I have proved guilty—at least to my own satisfaction—of intellectual dishonesty and financial turpitude; of Frazer I know nothing whatever. I vaguely pictured him as one of several distinguished compilers of whom I knew nothing; that beastly quotation at the head of one of your chapters came as a great shock to me, which grew into a very cataclysm when I found it followed by another and a longer one.
I won’t call you an Englishman again. But it is funny that you can’t write about yourself without going into the matter of what you think or do not think about religion....