It will soon be three weeks since I came back here from Chelsea--which I was capable of leaving, yes, without having made you a sign. It was a case, dearest Howard, of the essential inevitability--the mark you yourself must in these days so recognise in all your omissions and frustrations, all your lapses from the mortal act. Even you must have to know them so on your own part--and you must feel them just to _have_ to be as they are (and as you are.) That was the way the like things had to be with me--as _I_ was; and it's to insult our long and perfect understanding not to feel that you have treasures of the truest interpretation of everything whatever in our common condition. Oh how I so want at last, all the same, to have a direct word or two from your blest self on your own share of that community! I have questioned whomsoever I could in any faint degree suppose worth questioning on this score of the _show_ you are making--but of course, I admit, elicited no word of any real value. Five words of your own articulation--by which I mean scratches of your own pen--will go further with me than any amount of roundabout twaddle. I hear of predatory loose women quartered upon you again--and I groan in my far-off pain; especially when I reflect that _their_ fatuous account would be that you were in health and joy quite exactly by reason of them. I think the great public blackness most of all makes me send out this signal to you--as if I were lighting the twinkle of a taper to set over against you in my window.
_August 5th._ The taper went out last night, and I am afraid I now kindle it again to a very feeble ray--for it's vain to try to talk as if one weren't living in a nightmare of the deepest dye. How can what is going on not be to one as a huge horror of blackness? Of course that is what it is to you, dearest Howard, even as it is to your infinitely sickened inditer of these lines. The plunge of civilization into this abyss of blood and darkness by the wanton feat of those two infamous autocrats is a thing that so gives away the whole long age during which we have supposed the world to be, with whatever abatement, gradually bettering, that to have to take it all now for what the treacherous years were all the while really making for and _meaning_ is too tragic for any words. But one's reflections don't really bear being uttered--at least we each make them enough for our individual selves and I didn't mean to smother you under mine in addition to your own....