I am sorry if I wrote you an unenthusiastic letter a year ago; but sometimes when one has to reply to a great many letters at one sitting, one's enthusiasm does get pumped rather dry, you know. I surely can thank you very warm heartedly for your appreciation of the stories³ in "Obscure Destinies"⁴. Those three stories are, every one of them, very near to my heart, for personal reasons. Moreover, I want to do all I can to overcome the provincial American prejudice against stories of that length. This is the only country⁵ in which stories of that length are dismissed rather lightly as minor pieces, simply because they are short. It is the custom here to rank a novel like the "Arrow of Gold"⁶, which is distinctly Conrad⁷'s second best, as more important than a masterpiece like "Youth"⁸, which could scarcely be better than it is - and which, of course, would have been quite ruined had he tried to expand it into a long narrative.

The long short story has always held such a dignified and important place in French literature that I wish it might command that same position in our own country.

No, it does not distress me at all to see hear that a young man in Baltimore⁹ is working on a thesis, but if you know him, I suggest that you warn him to approach his subject in a more rational manner than that employed by young Mr. MacNamara¹⁰, whose article¹¹ in the Catholic World¹² you may have seen. It is absurd to measure the "spiritual growth", or even the intellectual growth, chronologically. Our great enlightenments always come in flashes. The spirit of man has its ups and downs like his body, and the Roman Church of all others, it seems to me, has always had the wisdom and the kindliness to realize that instability in us.