/# The work just finished was the revision of _The High Bid_, shortly to be produced by Mr. and Mrs. Forbes Robertson. #/
G. T. Lapsley has gone to bed--he has been seeing the New Year in with me (generously giving a couple of days to it)--and I snatch this hour from out the blizzard of Xmas and Year's End and New Year's Beginning missives, to tell you too belatedly how touched I have been with your charming little Xmas memento--an exquisite and interesting piece for which I have found a very effective position on the little old oak-wainscotted wall of my very own room. There it will hang as a fond reminder of tout ce que je vous dois. (I am trying to make use of an accursed "fountain" pen--but it's a vain struggle; it beats me, and I recur to this familiar and well-worn old unimproved utensil.) I have passed here a very solitary and _casanier_ Christmastide (of wondrous still and frosty days, and nights of huge silver stars,) and yesterday finished a job of the last urgency for which this intense concentration had been all vitally indispensable. I got the conditions, here at home thus, in perfection--I put my job through, and now--or in time--it may have, on my scant fortunes, a far-reaching effect. If it does have, you'll be the first all generously to congratulate me, and to understand why, under the stress of it, I couldn't indeed break my little started spell of application by a frolic absence from my field of action. If it, on the contrary, fails of that influence I offer my breast to the acutest of your silver arrows; though the beautiful charity with which you have drawn from your critical quiver nothing more fatally-feathered than that dear little framed and glazed, squared and gilded étrenne serves for me as a kind of omen of my going unscathed to the end.... I admit that it's horrible that we can't--nous autres--talk more face to face of the other phenomena; but life is terrible, tragic, perverse and abysmal--besides, _patientons_. I can't pretend to speak of the phenomena that are now renewing themselves round you; for _there_ is the eternal penalty of my having shared your cup last year--that I must _taste_ the liquor or go without--there can be no question of my otherwise handling the cup. Ah I'm conscious enough, I assure you, of going without, and of all the rich arrears that will never--for me--be made up--! But I hope for yourselves a thoroughly good and full experience--about the possibilities of which, as I see them, there is, alas, all too much to say. Let me therefore but wonder and wish!... But it's long past midnight, and I am yours and Teddy's ever so affectionate