ou were always so friendly to us that I have summoned up
courage to write this letter. You know perhaps that my
husband was interned over a year ago, and repatriated last
September; he has lost everything, of course; but so far he
is well and able to get along in Germany. Harold and I have
been jogging on here as best we can on my own little
income--'Huns in our midst' as we are, we see practically
nobody. What a pity we cannot all look into each other's
hearts, isn't it? I used to think we were a 'fair-play'
people, but I have learned the bitter truth--that there is no
such thing when pressure comes. It's much worse for Harold
than for me; he feels his paralysed position intensely, and
would, I'm sure, really rather be 'doing his bit' as an
interned, than be at large, subject to everyone's suspicion
and scorn. But I am terrified all the time that they _will_
intern him. You used to be intimate with Mr. Harburn. We have
not seen him since the first autumn of the war, but we know
that he has been very active in the agitation, and is very
powerful in this matter. I have wondered whether he can
possibly realise what this indiscriminate internment of the
innocent means to the families of the interned. Could you not
find a chance to try and make him understand? If he and a few
others were to stop hounding on the government, it would
cease, for the authorities must know perfectly well that all
the dangerous have been disposed of long ago. You have no
notion how lonely one feels in one's native land nowadays; if
I should lose Harold too I think I might go under, though
that has never been my habit.

Believe me, dear Mr. Cumbermere,
Most truly yours
HELEN HOLSTEIG."

On receiving this letter I was moved by compassion, for it required no
stretch of imagination to picture the life of that lonely British
mother and her son; and I thought very carefully over the advisability
of speaking to Harburn, and consulted the proverbs: "Speech is silver,
but Silence is golden--When in doubt play trumps." "Second thoughts are
best--He who hesitates is lost." "Look before you leap--Delays are
dangerous." They balanced so perfectly that I had recourse to
Commonsense, which told me to abstain. But meeting Harburn at the Club a
few days later and finding him in a genial mood, I let impulse p