e French village. You would
have given it to me, I know. But I felt it would have been wrong,
stupid, and thoughtless of me to have started an expedition doomed to
swift failure, and perhaps fraught with disaster and distress. You are a
man of dominant personality: your intellect is exigent, more so than
that of any man I ever knew: your demands on life are enormous: you
require response, or you annihilate: the pleasure of being with you is
in the clash of personality, the intellectual battle, the war of ideas.
To survive you, one must have a strong brain, an assertive ego, a
dynamic character. In your luncheon parties, in the old days, the
remains of the guests were taken away with the _debris_ of the feast. I
have often lunched with you in Park Lane and found myself the only
survivor. I might have driven on the white roads, or through the leafy
lanes, of France, with a fool, or with the wisest of all things, a
child: with you, it would have been impossible. You should thank me
sincerely for having saved you from an experience that each of us would
have always regretted.

Will you ask me why then, when I was in prison, I accepted with grateful
thanks your offer? My dear Frank, I don't think you will ask so
thoughtless a question. The prisoner looks to liberty as an immediate
return to all his ancient energy, quickened into more vital forces by
long disuse. When he goes out, he finds he has still to suffer: his
punishment, as far as its effects go, lasts intellectually and
physically just as it lasts socially: he has still to pay: one gets no
receipt for the past when one walks out into the beautiful air....

I have now spent the whole of my Sunday afternoon--the first real day of
summer we have had--in writing to you this long letter of explanation.

I have written directly and simply: I need not tell the author of "Elder
Conklin" that sweetness and simplicity of expression take more out of
one than fiddling harmonics on one string. I felt it my duty to write,
but it has been a distressing one. It would have been _better_ for me to
have lain in the brown grass on the cliff, or to have walked slowly by
the sea. It would have been kinder of you to have written to me directly
about whatever harsh or hurt feelings you may have about me. It would
have saved me an afternoon of strain, and tension.

But I have something more to say. It is pleasanter to me, now, to write
about others, than about myself.

The enclosed is f