If I had been told that one of my friends was soon to die, your father³ would have been almost the last for whom death seemed possible—unless in an accident of some kind. He simply seemed to me one of the strongest people I knew, in body and in purpose. (I am astonished to learn his age.) I didn't see him very often during a winter, but I always felt that he was "there," in a very positive sense, and even five minutes with him invariably set me up. I had absolute confidence in him. He was my kind—by that I mean that he was the one of the type persons whom I admire, respect, understand,—at once and without reservation, by instinct. There are not many of the younger men in whom I feel that kind of confidence; that in art, or business, or merely in human behaviour, they will always see that the straight thing and the crooked thing are not the same, even if they do not shout about it. That mere perception is the thing that counts: without it human life life would be too unutterably dull and filthy. If all the great 'loyalties' are utter lies—why then, they are simply ever so much better ⬩W⬩S⬩C⬩than the truth. And that was what brought ideals out of the dung heap in the first place—because creatures weren't content with dung, though it is always there and, in a sense, more "real." I don't mean to be writing you an essay, but you are, thank God, one of these few younger men in whom I do believe. Though in you it takes a different form than in your father, at in it's essence it's the same quality. I think it's the best thing you got from him, and I hope you'll always cherish it. (If you don't you'll be unhappy, I can tell you that!) I don't expect you to be a reformer, I merely expect you to preserve intact and to make better still that delicate instrument inside one which knows the cheap from the fine. The recognition of the really fine is simply one of the richest pleasures in life.

When I began this letter I did not foresee that it would take this turn (rather sermon-ish) but I usually write as I feel, and the shock of your father's death brings up the old questions:—what do I really admire in people, and what is worth saving in a time when so much is being scrapped. But we needn't save it; it has an artful dodge of saving itself. It has survived all the "realities" and "discoveries" and has been through times much worse than ours. It can well rest a hundred years or two.