XXXIV
Richard Haven to Verena Raby

My Dear, I have found you a Reader, but I hate to part with her. It would not, however, do for anyone so young and comely to sit at the bedside of a hale man of my years, and so you shall have her. But O her voice! Irish, and south-west Irish at that. In point of fact, Kerry, with hints of the Gulf Stream in it, all warm and caressing.

Miss Clemency Power—that is her pretty name—is not, I take it, in any kind of need, but she worked all through the War and wants to continue to be independent. And quite right too, say I. And Robbie Burns said it before me, in one of his English efforts:—

the glorious privilege
of being independent,

he called it.

Miss Power is going to you on Thursday on a month’s probation, and she is my gift to you, remember: I have arranged it all. It is very Sultanic to be distributing young women like this, and you must be properly grateful. I was never Sultanic before.

Here’s a nice thing my sister Violet’s charwoman said yesterday. Violet seems to have been looking rather more wistful than usual, but for no particular reason. The charwoman, however, noticed it and commented upon it.

“You look very sad this morning,” she said. “But then,” she added, “ladies generally do.”

“Why is that?” Violet asked.

“They have such difficult lives,” she said. “It’s their husbands, I think.”

“But you have a husband.”

“Yes, but we don’t notice our husbands as much as you do. They come in and they’re cross and they swear, and we let them. We’ve got our work to get on with. But with ladies it’s different; they take notice.”

Your daily poem:—

He who bends to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy;
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity’s sunrise.
If you trap the moment before it’s ripe
The tears of repentance you’ll certainly wipe;
But if once you let the ripe moment go,
You can never wipe off the tears of woe.

A lot of wisdom there, but for most of us, who are so far from being children, rather a counsel of perfection.—Good night.

R. H.

P.S.—A travelling friend tells me that outside the gate of the Misericordia, in Osaka, Japan, is this notice, the meaning of which is clear after a moment’s examination: “The sisters of the Misericordia harbour every kind of disease and have no respect for religion.”