The book⁴ has just reached me, the apartment⁵ having been closed all summer and packages and second class mail piling up.–Lord, it’s a grim one, Dorothy, this last book of yours. About a year ago you joked me about a middle-aged note in the Professor⁶–and now you’ve gone and done the same thing, surely, surely! Of course that theme, the final and fateful claim of blood, the thing that comes out in the second or third generation, is about the hardest, tightest, most awfully true one there is. Isn’t it the theme of most of the Greek tragedies—what is handed down? And haven’t I seen it over and over in Red Cloud⁷? As soon as the baby is born the story operates itself entirely, without a push. The terrible wife is as she must be, old Hicks is so good and so real and comes into the grim meaning when he should.–All the background of that wife is so real. There’s not a thing I don’t like in the story—except the mood. I don’t mean the tone or the writing at all, but the emotional mood—which is very different from those other two. I’m afraid I have to have more sugar, more sticky-prettiness. It’s too grim, this. I can admire it, but I can’t honestly like it, anymore than I can Ethan Frome⁸. It is the mood, Dorothy, it’s too much for me. It affects me very powerfully, but I protest. I say “all right, cut out everything but moral beauty; but why does moral beauty usually hve have to happen in a sordid atmosphere? I think that’s a convention,—it doesn’t!” H It wasn’t up to anybody to stand Ralph’s wife–not for any reason, nor for you and me to stand her - - - unless you do the little girl now and make it all worth while. It’s “a beginning”, there seems to be a way out on that side, but the promise isn’t enough for me. You yourself are depressed by it—it never drags because it operates itself once it’s set in motion—but I do feel as if you were grim and grave while you were writing it. Weren’t you? And if you do Dids, please give a a potion, ru rub a juice on her eyelids, so that she’ll never see the ugliness behind her. It’s possible: people can come out of a home full of squalor and see - - - - only Jaffrey woods. It’s a fine book, Dorothy, but it makes me heavy-hearted.