"You do see, don't you?" said Mrs. Jeremy. "All the others get letters and things from their friends, and poor Mr. Mackinnon gets nothing. Katharine wants to get up a surprise for him, and she's asking half-a-dozen of her friends to send him things and write him jolly letters." She picked up the muffler she had been knitting. "This is for him, and I said you'd do the letter. You write such jolly ones."
Jeremy threw away the end of his cigar and got up.
"Yes, but what about?" he said, running his hand through his hair. "This is going to be very difficult."
"Oh, just one of your nice funny letters like you write to me."
"Quite like that?" said Jeremy earnestly.
"Well, not quite like that," smiled Mrs. Jeremy; "but you know what I mean. He'd love it."
"Very well," said Jeremy, "we'll see what we can do."
He withdrew to his library and got to work.
"_My dear Mr. Mackinnon_," he wrote, "_the weather here is perfectly beastly_."
He looked at it thoughtfully and then put it on one side. "We won't destroy it," he said to himself, "because we may have to come back to it, but at present we don't like it."
"_My dear Mackinnon, who do you think it is? Your old friend Jeremy Smith!_"
He murmured it to himself three or four times, crossed out "old" and put "new," and then placed this sheet on the top of the other.
"_My dear Mackinnon, yesterday the Vicar_----"
"I knew it would be difficult," he said, and took a fourth sheet. Absently he began to jot down a few possible openings:--
"_Have you read Mrs. Humphry Ward's latest ..._"
"Yes," he said, "but we're not being really funny enough."
He collected his letters as far as they had gone and took them to his wife.
"You see what will happen, darling," he said. "Mr. Mackinnon will read them, and he will say to himself, 'There's a man called Jeremy P. Smith who is a fool.' The news will travel down the line. They will tell themselves in Alsace that J. P. Smith, the Treasurer of the Little Blessington Cricket Club, is lacking in grey matter. The story will get across to the Germans in some garbled form; 'Smith off crumpet,' or something of that sort. It will reach the Grand Duke NICHOLAS; it will traverse the neutral countries; everywhere the word will be spread that your husband is, as they say, barmy. I ask you, dear--is it fair to Baby?"