My Dear, I hope that this heat isn’t too much for you, but perhaps your circumambient heights promote a breeze. London has been stifling. The War has certainly broken down many of our old conventions. Who, even in the hottest summer, ever before saw bathing in the Trafalgar Square fountains? Or stark naked boys careering round Gordon’s statue. But I saw them to-day—a score of them—with a policeman after them; for against bathing there is a law to break, apparently. The constable did not run, he merely advanced; but they scampered before him, all gleaming in the evening sun, dragging their scanty clothes behind them, and those who were leading paused now and then to get a leg into their trousers, hesitated, failed, and were away again. It is astonishing how little space can intervene between what appears to be a sauntering policeman and a naked fleeing boy. This constable was like Fate.

I once read somewhere that clever women always tell men that they look overworked. Yesterday I made the discovery of a form of words even more soothing when proceeding from feminine lips: another weapon in the clever woman’s verbal armoury—should she need any assistance that way. The solicitous phrase “You are looking overworked,” is unction perhaps more for the young than the middle-aged and elderly. No young man, however conscious of his own abysmal laziness, can resist it, or want to resist it. But the maturer man—the man to whom Father Time’s chief gift is an increase of girth—must be differently handled. He may be overworked, but to be told about it, however seducingly, does not much interest him. Besides he knows when it is not true: when what looks like the effect of overwork (supposing the lady to have something to go upon) is really due to late hours or a glass too many. In short, he is a little too old for any flattery but the kind of flattery he is not too old for. Therefore the clever woman, in dealing with him, must do otherwise. Taking him by the hand, she must look at his features with a close and careful scrutiny which, although it is assumed, can be extremely comforting, and then say, in a tone almost of triumph, “You’re getting thinner.”

Isn’t it about time that you sent me another medical report? Here is a passage in Swift’s letters that I hit upon last night:—

“And remember that riches are nine parts in ten of all that is good in life, and health is the tenth; drinking coffee comes long after, and yet it is the eleventh; but without the two former, you cannot drink it right.”

And here is to-day’s poem:—

Who do you think wrote that? It is a very fine specimen of what I call “Novelists’ poetry”—the poetry which men known for their prose and romance now and then produce. Most of them occasionally try their hand, and often very interestingly. One of the best short poems in the language is an epitome of the life of man by Eden Phillpotts. Grant Allen wrote some remarkable lines. The author of The Children of the Ghetto has published a volume of his verses which is full of arresting things. Thomas Hardy, of course, has become poet altogether, and Maurice Hewlett seems to be that way inclined. But still I don’t tell you who wrote the lines just quoted: John Galsworthy.

R. H.