You can see, can't you? how strange and desperate it would be to "chuck" everything up, Lamb House, servants, Miss Bosanquet, _this_ newly acquired and prized resource, to come over, by a formidable and expensive journey, to spend a summer in the (at best) to me torrid and (the inmost inside of 95 apart) utterly arid and vacuous Cambridge. Dearest Alice, I could come back to America (could be carried back on a stretcher) to die--but never, never to live. To say how the question affects me is dreadfully difficult because of its appearing so to make light of you and the children--but when I think of how little Boston and Cambridge were of old ever _my_ affair, or anything but an accident, for me, of the parental life there to which I occasionally and painfully and losingly sacrificed, I have a superstitious terror of seeing them at the end of time again stretch out strange inevitable tentacles to draw me back and destroy me. And then I could never either make or afford the journey (I have no margin at all for _that_ degree of effort.) But you will have understood too well--without my saying more--how little I can dream of any déplacement now--especially for the sake of a milieu in which you and Peg and Bill and Alice and Aleck would be burdened with the charge of making up _all_ my life.... You see my capital--yielding all my income, intellectual, social, associational, on the old investment of so many years--my capital is _here_, and to let it all slide would be simply to become bankrupt. Oh if you only, on the other hand, you and Peg and Aleck, _could_ walk beside my bath-chair down this brave Thames-side I would get back into it again (it was some three weeks ago dismissed,) and half live there for the sake of your company. I have a kind of sense that you would be able to live rather pleasantly near me here--if you could once get planted. But of course I on my side understand all your present complications.