/* 21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, S.W.
I suppose myself to be trying to-day to get off a brief response both to Harry and to dear Peg (whom I owe, much rather, volumes of acknowledgment to;) but I put in first these few words to you and Alice--for the quite wrong reason that the couple of notes just received from you are those that have last come. This is because I feel as if I had worried you a good bit more than helped over the so interesting name-question of the Babe. It wasn't so much an attempted solution, at all, that I the other week hastily rushed into, but only a word or two that I felt I absolutely had to utter, for my own relief, by way of warning against our reembarking, any of us, on a fresh and possibly interminable career of the tiresome and graceless "Junior." You see I myself suffered from that tag to help out my identity for forty years, greatly disliking it all the while, and with my dislike never in the least understood or my state pitied; and I felt I couldn't be dumb if there was any danger of your Boy's being started unguardedly and _de gaieté de coeur_ on a like long course; so probably and desirably _very_ very long in his case, given your youth and "prominence," in short your immortal duration. It seemed to me I ought to do _something_ to conjure away the danger, though I couldn't go into the matter of exactly _what_, at all, as if we were only, and most delightfully, talking it over at our leisure and face to face--face to face with the Babe, I mean; as I wish to goodness we were! The different modes of evasion or attenuation, in that American world where designations are so bare and variations, of the accruing or "social" kind, so few, are difficult to go into this distance; and in short all that I meant at all by my attack was just a Hint! I feel so for poor dear Harry's carrying of _his_ tag--and as if I myself were directly responsible for it! However, no more of that.
To this machinery the complications arising from the socially so fierce London June inevitably (and in fact mercifully) drive me; for I feel the assault, the attack on one's time and one's strength, even in my so simplified and disqualified state; which it is my one great effort not to allow to be knocked about. However, I of course do succeed in simplifying and in guarding myself enormously; one can't but succeed when the question is so vital as it has now become with me. Which is really but a preface to telling you how much the most interesting thing in the matter has been, during the last three weeks, my regular sittings for my portrait to Sargent; which have numbered now some seven or eight, I forget which, and with but a couple more to come. So the thing is, I make out, very nearly finished, and the head apparently (as I much hope) to have almost nothing more done to it. It is, I infer, a very great success; a number of the competent and intelligent have seen it, and so pronounce it in the strongest terms.... In short it seems likely to be one of S.'s very fine things. One is almost full-face, with one's left arm over the corner of one's chair-back and the hand brought round so that the thumb is caught in the arm-hole of one's waistcoat, and said hand therefore, with the fingers a bit folded, entirely visible and "treated." Of course I'm sitting a little askance in the chair. The canvas comes down to just where my watch-chain (such as it is, poor thing!) is hung across the waistcoat: which latter, in itself, is found to be splendidly (poor thing though it also be) and most interestingly treated. Sargent _can_ make such things so interesting--such things as my coat-lappet and shoulder and sleeve too! But what is most interesting, every one is agreed, is the mouth--than which even he has never painted a more living and, as I am told, "expressive"! In fact I can quite see that myself; and really, I seem to feel, the thing will be all that can at the best (the best with such a subject!) have been expected of it. I only wish you and Alice had assisted at some of the sittings--as Sargent likes animated, sympathetic, beautiful, talkative friends to do, in order to correct by their presence too lugubrious expressions. I take for granted I shall before long have a photograph to send you, and then you will be able partially to judge for yourselves.