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Always examine both sides. In my house both sides is buttered.

Re your review of Mrs. Asquith. I thought it was very good but … your feeling was really contained in your words: “The type it reveals is not very intriguing.” She isn't your game. When all is said and done I feel that you haven't time for her and you don't care a Farthing Taster whether she made her horse walk upstairs or downstairs or in my lady's chamber. She would weary you. What is there really to get hold of? There's—nothing—in the sense you mean. The direct method (no, I can't for the life of me ‘see’ the other) of examining the specimen isn't really much good except in so far as one can … make certain deductions—discover certain main weaknesses and falsities. But it's a bit like trying to operate on a diseased mind by cutting open a brain. The devil is—Oh the very devil is that you may remove every trace of anything that shouldn't be there and make no end of a job of it and then in her case, in the case of all such women—the light comes back into the patient's eyes and with it the vaguest of vague elusive maddening smiles… Do you know what I mean? Here's, I think, the root of the matter. What Is Insensitiveness? We know or we could find out by examination what it is Not but it seems to me the quality hasn't been discovered yet. I mean it's x—it's a subject for research. It most certainly isn't only the lack of certain qualities: it's a kind of positive unknown. Does all this sound most awful nonsense to you? My vocabulary is awful, but I mean well and I faint, I thirst to talk. My landscape is terribly exciting at present. I never knew it contained such features or such fauna (they are animals various, aren't they?) But I do want a gentleman prepared to pay his own exes, to join me in my expedition. Oh, won't you come? No one else will do. But when you do it's a bit sickening—all my wild beasts get a bit funny-looking—they don't look such serious monsters page 78 any more. Instead of lions and tigers it's apt to turn into an affair of:

“The turkey ran pas' with a flag in his mas'

An' cried out: ‘What's the mattah?’”

Not that I think for one minute that you don't treat me au Grand serieux or would dare to question my intelligence, of course not. All the same—there you are—Alone, I'm no end of a fillaseafer but once you join me in the middle of my seriousness—my deadly seriousness—I see the piece of pink wool I have put on your hair (and that you don't know is there).

I sometimes wonder whether the act of surrender is not one of the greatest of all—the highest. It is one of the (most) difficult of all. Can it be accomplished or even apprehended except by the aristocrats of this world? You see it's so immensely complicated. It ‘needs’ real humility and at the same time an absolute belief in one's own essential freedom. It is an act of faith. At the last moments like all great acts it is pure risk. This is true for me as a human being and as a writer. Dear Heaven how hard it is to let go—to slip into the blue. And yet one's creative life depends on it and one desires to do nothing else. I shouldn't have begun on this in the corner of a letter, darling. It's not the place.