/* 21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, S.W.
Don't imagine for a moment that I don't feel the full horror of my having had to wait till now, when I can avail myself of this aid, to acknowledge, as the poor pale pettifogging term has it, the receipt from you of inexpressibly splendid bounties. I won't attempt to explain or expatiate--about this abject failure of utterance: the idea of "explaining" anything to _you_ in these days, or of any expatiation that isn't exclusively that of your own genius upon your own adventures and impressions! I think _the_ reason why I have been so baffled, in a word, is that all my powers of being anything else have gone to living upon your two magnificent letters, the one from Verdun, and the one after your second visit there; which gave me matter of experience and appropriation to which I have done the fullest honour. Your whole record is sublime, and the interest and the beauty and the terror of it all have again and again called me back to it. I have ventured to share it, for the good of the cause and the glory of the connection (mine,) with two or three select others--this I candidly confess to you--one of whom was dear Howard, absolutely as dear as ever through everything, and whom I all but reduced to floods of tears, tears of understanding and sympathy. I know them at last, your incomparable pages, by heart--and thus it is really that I feel qualified to speak to you of them. With the two sublimities in question, or between them, came of course also the couple of other favours, enclosing me, pressing back upon me, my attempted contribution to your Paris labour: to which perversity I have had to bow my head. I was very sorry to be so forced, but even while cursing and gnashing my teeth I got your post-office order cashed, and the money _is_, God knows, assistingly spendable here! Another pang was your mention of Jean du Breuil's death.... I didn't know him, had never seen him; but your account of the admirable manner of his end makes one feel that one would like even to have just beheld him. We are in the midst, the very midst, of histories of that sort, miserable and terrible, here too; the Neuve Chapelle business, from a strange, in the sense of being a pretty false, glamour at first flung about which we are gradually recovering, seems to have taken a hideous toll of officers, and other distressing legends (legends of mistake and confusion) are somehow overgrowing it too. But painful particulars are not what I want to give you--of anything; you are up to your neck in your own, and I had much rather pick my steps to the clear places, so far as there be any such! I continue to try and keep my own existence one, so far as I may--a place clear of the last accablement, I mean: apparently what it comes to is that it's "full up" with the last but one.