CXXV
Richard Haven to Verena Raby

Dearest Verena, I quite understand your nervousness about this new doctor, but I think you should be more of a gambler over it all. You should be more trustful of your star, which, though it (to my mind, very reprehensively), allowed you to have a horrid fall, has made things as comfortable as possible since. Until I hear to the contrary I intend to think of the new doctor as a godsend, and a very agreeable change to old Ferguson, who struck me as a prosy dog. Be an optimist, my dear.

The more I think of your money and your character, the more I incline towards alms-houses, which, in a human non-Nietzschean country like ours, I consider to be among the most satisfactory forms of sheer benevolence. But I am not wholly convinced, and I should hate to see the interest on £50,000 going in any way astray. Meanwhile I have made notes on the alms-houses in this book. But what perplexes me is that these benevolent people wait till they are dead. It would be far more fun to have alms-houses while one was alive and watch them at work.

Here is an essay on the death of an imaginary grandmother which little Mary Landseer has produced. The death of one’s grandmother had been set, by an almost too whimsical instructress, as the subject of a composition:—

“One day, I think it was the hapiest day in the world for me. My Granmother died and left me £50. Without waiting to morn or wait for her funral I was walking along Oxford St. in surch of things to buy. My heart was as light as a feather as I walked and my boots were up in the ere.

“First I thought of what my Husband would like me to have, then with a suden thought I turned my steps home-would, and that night I went to a play, the next a nother, and so I went on till I had only 10s. left. Then how I wished my other Granmother was died, but it was no good. And when I had children I wished I had not been so rash as to spend it on abusments, but had saved it, but it was gone for ever and my other Granmother never died, to my grat misfortune.”

It was Mary’s father who wrote that exquisite thing to a Vicereine in India. “I wash your feet with my hair,” he said at the end of a letter, employing an Indian phrase of courtesy, adding, “It is true that I have very little hair, but then you have very little feet.”

Behold the punctual poem:—

There is a flower I wish to wear,
But not until first worn by you—
Heartsease—of all earth’s flowers most rare;
Bring it; and bring enough for two.

Good night,

R. H.