really could not believe it. But at the end of
the next verse no doubt or error was possible. The young maenad
nearest me was concluding every strophe by shrieking that she didn't
care where the water went if it didn't get into the wine.* Now you
know.

[* The refrain of a poem in _The Flying Inn_.]

I have since ascertained that a breviary of this Black Mass can be
obtained at the Fabian Office, with notes of the numbers of the hymns
Ancient and Modern, and all the airs sacred and profane, to which
your poems have been set.

This letter needs no answer--indeed, admits of none. I leave you to
your reflections.

Ever

G.B.S.

"The Shaw Worm Turns on Wells" was a headline in the _New Witness_
over a vigorous and light-hearted attack. The others were apt to
score off Wells in these exchanges because he lost light-heartedness
and became irritable. Even with Gilbert he sometimes broke out,
although in a calmer moment he told Shaw that to get angry with
Chesterton was an impossibility. With Cecil Chesterton it was only
too easy to get angry at any rate as he appeared in the _New Witness_.
But I think when he heard Cecil was in France Wells must have
regretted one of the letters he wrote to Gilbert, just before the
change of editorship.

It was curious, the contrast between the genial personality so loved
by his friends and the waspishness so often shown by Cecil and his
staff in the columns of the paper. "His extraordinary personality,"
writes E. S. P. Haynes, "wonderfully penetrated the eccentricity of
his appearance. His features were slightly fantastic and his voice
was as loudly discordant as his laughter; but the real charm and
generosity of his character were so transparent that one never seemed
to be conscious of the physical medium."

Yet with all my sympathy for many of the _New Witness_ ideas my
nerves jangle when I read the volumes of Cecil's editorship, and I
think jangled nerves explain if they do not excuse this outburst by
Wells:

MY DEAR G.K.C.

Haven't I on the whole behaved decently to you? Haven't I always
shown a reasonable civility to you and your brother and Belloc?
Haven't I betrayed at times a certain affection for you? Very well,
then you will understand that I don't start out to pick a needless
quarrel with the _New Witness_ crowd. But this business of the
Hueffer book in the _New Witness_ makes me sick. Some disgusting
littl