Friday and Saturday I retired from the world with your fat book⁴ and read and nursed my cold. I didn't insult you by reading it at a sitting, as people are always telling me they do with mine. On the whole, I enjoyed the French part most. The American family are splendid, and every word about their life cuts both ways,- does the particular and the general. The mother, of course, is our national shame, but she's absolutely true and I think you've got her down as she is for the first time. I don't believe she's ever been done before. The old Basque woman is a splendid figure, almost the most vivid in the book, one gets everywhere such a strong feeling of her physical personality and the amount of vitality in her. All the servants are good, and the rags under the sink, Oh Lord! They're under mine, at this moment. It's the one thing I can never change.

Marise is a lovely creature, and you've kept a bloom of indeterminate youth upon her. One doesn't know too much about her, after she begins to grow up,- or rather, one does know, one merely isn't told too much. Neale is just as real until he goes to college. Then he doesn't grow any less real, but, for me, you follow him too closely and tell too much about him. I would like "An Education in the Humanities" to be about half as long as it is. It doesn't drag, exactly, only one could get on with less and still have the boy,- a good deal of it comes to the surface in the Roman part, afterward. You've made him a good deal more explicit than the girl, and so, to me, he's not as interesting. He's painted in so literally. Perhaps I'm hipped on the matter of withholding characters, but it seems to me that if a character is delivered too minutely, it has the same effect that the informality of family intercourse often has; if you grow up in a small house with four or five brothers, their characteristics are so perpetually under your feet and in your way that you don't appreciate them as individuals. Discerning strangers probably see them much more as they really are. I remember how absolutely mysterious your cousin Nat⁵ seemed to me. He probably wasn't to his sister, and yet I think I was right. If you had followed Marise's thoughts as closely, and all the effects her mother's behaviour had on her, she wouldn't take hold of one as she does. Now her father is particularly successful for just that reason. He puzzles me, and yet I feel his personality acutely, feel him inside his clothes, and to me he's the most attractive man in the book. Neale is perfectly real and alive, only one somehow gets too familiar with him. In the Roman part I don't feel that. His adventure with the cat is a brilliant introduction. I love t the father in Vermont⁶, with Hetty. I don't think the book's too long, except as regards the boy. I put in two afternoons, long ones, absolutely absorbed by it, and felt no drag. The things about Neale were good in themselves, but there were o so many that, for me, that defeated their purpose somewhat. I like all the little-boy part, and his father and mother.

This is a fine day, and this afternoon I'm going up to see your mother⁷.