/* 21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, S.W. Feb. 23rd, 1913. */
Let this mechanic form and vulgar legibility notify you a little at the start that I am in rather a hampered and hindered state, and that that must plead both for my delay in acknowledging your dear faithful letter of the New Year time, and for my at last having to make the best of this too impersonal art.... I won't go into the history of my woes--all the more that I really hope I have shuffled the worst of them off. Even in this most recent form they have been part and parcel of the grave illness that overtook me as long ago as at the New Year, 1910, and with a very imperfect recovery from which I was struggling during those weary American months of winter-before-last when we planned so in vain that I should come to you in Washington. I have deeply regretted, ever since, my failure of that pleasure--all the more that I don't see it now as conceivably again within my reach. I am restored to this soil, for whatever may remain to me of my mortal career. The grand swing across the globe, which you and Harry will again nobly accomplish--again and yet again--now simply mocks at my weakness and my reduced resources. Besides, I am but too thankful to have a refuge in which _continuously_ to crouch. Please fix well in your mind that continuity--as making it easy for you some day to find me here. The continuity is broken simply by my reverting to the country for the summer and autumn--a mere change from the blue bed to the brown, and then from the brown back again to this Thames-side perch, which I call the blue. I hang here, for six months, straight over the River and find it delightful and interesting, at once ever so quiet and ever so animated. The River has a quantity of picturesque and dramatic life and motion that one had never appreciated till one had thrown oneself on it _de confiance_. But it's another London, this old Chelsea of simplifications and sacrifices, from the world in which I so like to feel that I for so long lived more or less _with_ you. I feel somehow as much away from that now as you and Harry must feel amid your new Washington horizons--and it has of itself, for that matter, gone to pieces under the sweep of the big broom of Time, which has scattered it without ceremony. A few vague and altered relics of it occasionally dangle for a moment before me. I was going to say "cross my path"--but I haven't now such a thing as a path, or it goes such a very few steps. I try meanwhile to project myself in imagination into your Washington existence--and, besides your own allusions to it, a passing visit a few days since from Walter Berry helped me a little to fix the shining vision. W. B. had been, I gathered, but a day or two near you, and wasn't in possession of many particulars. Beyond this, too, though you shine to me you shine a bit fearfully--for I can't rid myself (in a world of Chelsea limits and fashions) of a sense of the _formidable_, the somehow--at least for the likes of _me_!--difficult and bristling and glaring, side of the American conditions. However, you of course lightly ride the whirlwind--or at any rate have only as much or as little of the storms as you will, and can pick out of it only such musical thunder-rolls and most purely playful forked lightnings as suit you best. What I mean is that here, after a fashion, a certain part of the work of discrimination and selection and primary clearing of the ground is already done for one, in a manner that enables one to begin, for one's self, further on or higher up; whereas over there I seemed to see myself, speaking only from my own experience, often beginning so "low down," just in that way of sifting and selecting, that all one's time went to it and one was spent before arriving at any very charming altitude. This you will find obscure, but study it well--though strictly in private, so as not to give me away as a sniffy critic. Heaven knows I indulge in the most remorseless habits of criticism _here_--even if I make no great public use of them, through the increasing privacy and antiquity of my life. I kind of wonder about the bearing of the queer Democratic régime that seems as yet so obscurely to loom upon any latent possibilities (that might have been) on Harry's and your "career"--just as I wonder what unutterable queerness may not, as a feature of the whole conundrum, "representatively" speaking, before long cause us all here to sit up and stare: one or two such startling rumours about the matter, I trust groundless, having already had something of that effect.