I have myself been shut up in a sick room for five weeks past, seeing hardly anyone but my wife and the doctor, a bad state of the heart being the cause. We shall be at West Malvern in ten days, where I hope to begin to mend.
Hurrah for Henry Higginson and his gift[26] to the University! I think the Club cannot fail to be useful if they make it democratic enough.
I hope that Roland is enjoying Washington, but not so far transubstantiated into a politician as to think that McKinley & Co. are the high-water mark of human greatness up to date.
John Ropes, more than most men, seems as if he would be natural to meet again.
Please give our love to Mrs. Gray, and believe me, affectionately yours,
WM. JAMES.
To Miss Frances R. Morse.
Lamb House, Dec. 23, 1899.
Dearest Fanny,—About a week ago I found myself thinking a good deal about you.
I may possibly have begun by wondering how it came that, after showing such a spontaneous tendency towards that "clandestine correspondence" early in the season, you should recently, in spite of pathetic news about me, and direct personal appeals, be showing such great epistolary reserve. I went on to great lengths about you; and ended by realizing your existence, and its significance, as it were, very acutely. I composed a letter to you in my mind, whilst lying awake, dwelling in a feeling manner on the fact that human beings are born into this little span of life of which the best thing is its friendships and intimacies, and soon their places will know them no more, and yet they leave their friendships and intimacies with no cultivation, to grow as they will by the roadside, expecting them to "keep" by force of mere inertia; they contribute nothing empirical to the relation, treating it as something transcendental and metaphysical altogether; whereas in truth it deserves from hour to hour the most active care and nurture and devotion. "There's that Fanny," thought I, "the rarest and most precious, perhaps, of all the phenomena that enter into the circle of my experience. I take her for granted; I seldom see her—she has never passed a night in our house![27] and yet of all things she is the one that probably deserves the closest and most unremitting attention on my part. This transcendental relation of persons to each other in the absolute won't do! I must write to Fanny and tell her, in spite of her deprecations, just how perfect and rare and priceless a fact I know her existence in this Universe eternally to be. This very morrow I will dictate such a letter to Alice." The morrow came, and several days succeeded, and brought each its impediment with it, so that letter doesn't get written till today. And now Alice, who had suddenly to take Peggy (who is with us for ten days) out to see a neighbor's little girl, comes in; so I will give the pen to her.