/# The book sent to Mr. Adams was _Notes of a Son and Brother_, now just published. #/
/* 21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, S.W. March 21, 1914. */
I have your melancholy outpouring of the 7th, and I know not how better to acknowledge it than by the full recognition of its unmitigated blackness. _Of course_ we are lone survivors, of course the past that was our lives is at the bottom of an abyss--if the abyss _has_ any bottom; of course, too, there's no use talking unless one particularly _wants_ to. But the purpose, almost, of my printed divagations was to show you that one _can_, strange to say, still want to--or at least can behave as if one did. Behold me therefore so behaving--and apparently capable of continuing to do so. I still find my consciousness interesting--under _cultivation_ of the interest. Cultivate it _with_ me, dear Henry--that's what I hoped to make you do--to cultivate yours for all that it has in common with mine. _Why_ mine yields an interest I don't know that I can tell you, but I don't challenge or quarrel with it--I encourage it with a ghastly grin. You see I still, in presence of life (or of what you deny to be such,) have reactions--as many as possible--and the book I sent you is a proof of them. It's, I suppose, because I am that queer monster, the artist, an obstinate finality, an inexhaustible sensibility. Hence the reactions--appearances, memories, many things, go on playing upon it with consequences that I note and "enjoy" (grim word!) noting. It all takes doing--and I _do_. I believe I shall do yet again--it is still an act of life. But you perform them still yourself--and I don't know what keeps me from calling your letter a charming one! There we are, and it's a blessing that you understand--I admit indeed alone--your all-faithful
/# "Minnie" is of course Mary Temple, the young cousin of old days commemorated in the last chapter of _Notes of a Son and Brother_. #/
/* 21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, S.W. March 29th, 1914. */
This is a Saturday a.m., but several days have come and gone since there came to me your dear and beautiful letter of March 14th (considerably about my "Notes,") and though the American post closes early I must get off some word of recognition to you, however brief I have scramblingly to make it. I hoped of course you would find in the book something of what I difficultly tried to put there--and you have indeed, you have found all, and I rejoice, because it was in talk with you in that terrible winter of 1910-11 that the impulse to the whole attempt came to me. Glad you will be to know that the thing appears to be quite extraordinarily appreciated, absolutely acclaimed, here--scarcely any difficulties being felt as to "parts that are best," unless it be that the early passage and the final chapter about dear Minnie seem the great, the beautiful "success" of the whole. What I have been able to do for _her_ after all the long years--judged by this test of expressed admiration--strikes me as a wondrous stroke of fate and beneficence of time: I seem really to have (her letters and ---- 's and your admirable committal of them to me aiding) made her emerge and live on, endowed her with a kind dim sweet immortality that places and keeps her--and I couldn't be at all sure that I was doing it; I was so anxious and worried as to my really getting the effect in the right way--with tact and taste and without overstrain....