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Let me add one word to our all too brief conversation this afternoon. Alas! what a plague is Time. No sooner has one begun to appreciate what the other is seeing than—it's as though, at a turn of the planet—he is whirled away.

The question of the Artist and his Time is, I am sure, the Question of Questions. The artist who denies his Time, who turns away from it even so much as the fraction of a hair, is false. First, he must be free; that is, he must be controlled by none other than his deepest self, his truest self. And then he must accept Life, he must submit—give himself so utterly to Life that no personal quâ personal self remains. Does that convey anything? It's so hard to state. “Bitterness” is a difficult word for me to disentangle from a sense of personal wrong—a “this is what Life has done to me.” But I know you don't mean that. You mean a bigger thing—the gesture with which one turns aside to-day from what might have been—what ought to have been. There is humour in it, of a kind, and inevitable sadness…

But let me confess, Sydney. I feel something else as well—and that is Love. But that's so difficult to explain. It's not pity or rainbows or anything up in the air— Perhaps it's feeling, feeling, feeling.