Florence 30 Dec 85.

My darling – Many thanks for your Xmas letter and for the dear little etchings, which I shall have framed.

I seem to feel a sort of vague depression throughout your letter. I like to know when you are cheerful, dear child, & when you are depressed ; but I also like to know, if possible, why.

What is all this rubbish about being selfish & jealous ? If it is about me that you are jealous, it is just absurd. I either found the people who suit me best, in the XXX , at once, or else, as I grow older, I become less able to find real people to suit me. Personally, being the least/most jealous of mortals, I think jealousy contemptible particularly in friendship : a feeling evolved for the benefit of married people lest other folks’ babies should be foisted on them ! And which has somehow crept into other relations ; useful there, I suppose, to keep one up to the mark & to prevent all things turning stale ; also useful I think, or affording the salutary or damnable flash in which one sees the beloved’s faults, in which one’s heart is set free (which it ought always to be) and one’s ideal is killed off, to reincarnate elsewhere – If in the meanwhile it afford you any satisfaction to know that I have found no one to care for more than you, & that it is much more than improbable I ever shall, accept this scientific fact.

If, on the other hand, as I suspect, your depression & consequent sense of unworthiness/depression makes me think other folks unworthy) arises, as most things arise, from a different cause than you suppose --, if it is that you are beginning again to care for my friend, philosophically console yourself by considering that reciprocity of feeling is the first step on the fatal road where the ideal is lost. What I say sounds cynical, but it is not. I am not depressed about any one save myself, and the apparent uselessness with which I am threatened, & which I must circumvent to some degree.

The reading of Bourget’s very marvellous book has made me feel that there wd be little satisfaction in feeling oneself to be a remarkable intellect, an exquisite writer, a professionnal success, an amiable creature, unless one could find the handle of that pump that Hercules worked, & turn all the oceans into this filthy world, particularly the filthy land of France, to clean the place & drown the intelligent vermin which infest it. Faugh ! That paper on Dumas Fils ! That disease, called La Femme – a disease of the French brain & heart. I don’t know when I have felt so sick. But wd Some things I can stand in patience ;  but when it comes to these dirty buster insulting what it, after all, the least dirty thing in this dirty world, womankind, in order to exonerate themselves.

It strikes me you may be fancying yourself jealous of Miss Blomfield. She gave me a spasme psychologique for ten days – interest in her curious chivalric, Brangwain[1] sort of soul – a spasm of vanity too at her adoration of me. But that’s all. I am ashamed to think how little affection I feel for this amiable creature. She is, apart from her very decided literary gift & her strange Brangwain character, not a fleur pour porter à sa boutonnière, and you know that I want such things.

She is astonishingly below the average in appearance, manners, education & interest in things. She is very ill, poor girl, anaemic & hysterical & has had many misfortunes ; but she is so without natural energy, & so has evidently always lived with such fearful frumps & stupids (sic) of the clerical sort, that she is below not only her talents, but below, so to speak, her own misfortunes & merits.

I suspect Mary Wakefield has simply got bored to extinction with her absolute want of anything external that can take the imagination & the presence of much that worries it. Fortunately I am more honest than I suspect her to be ; I always held back & told the girl the only way I could take an interest in her was to try to make me more of what her talents & character warrant. I shall certainly be loyal & do my best by her, but sentiment, sentimental sentiments (sic), particularly I can have only for people who/

have something obviously & patently superior to myself ; who have an influence of some sort upon me, enlarge my world or my power of seeing.

This letter reads like a model of cynicism &  conceit ; yet I am neither cynical nor conceited.

Tell me I am a beast ; and I shall laugh in your face ! be quite pleased. # I must be off to the hospital now ; it is bitterly cold & the people are dying there very quickly.

I haven’t been allowed to see Bella yet.

Thank M. Geo. Macmillan when you see him for his kind note. I wrote on behalf of Mrs Callander.

Goodbye darling Mouse, love your