_To W. D. Howells._
34 De Vere Gardens, W.
Jan. 29th [1893].
My dear Howells,
Two beneficent notes have I had from you since last I wrote you a word:
one in regard to looking, effectively, after some _Cosmopolitan_
business in the autumn; the other a heavenly remark or two (still
further sublimated by Mildred's lovely photograph) in lately forwarding
me--with a courtesy worthy of a better cause--a particularly shameless
autograph-seeker's letter. For such and all of these good gifts I am
more thankful than the hurrying, days have left me much of a chance to
tell you. Most especially am I grateful for the portrait of the
beautiful, beautiful maiden. Please thank her from me, if not for
sending it, at least for so felicitously sitting for it. It makes me
jump the torrent of the years and reconstruct from her fine features the
mythological past--a still tenderer youth than her present youth. (I
ought to be able to mean my _own_; but I can't manage it--her profile
won't help me to _that_.) I envy you and your wife her company and I
rejoice for you in her presence. I rejoice for myself, my dear Howells,
about your so delicate words to me in regard to a bit of recent work.
They go to my heart--they go perhaps still straighter to my head! I am
so utterly lonely here--on the "literary plane"--that it is the
strangest as well as the sweetest sensation to be conscious in the
boundless void--the dim desert sands--of any human approach at all or
any kindly speech. Therefore please be very affectionately thanked.--All
this while I never see anything that you yourself have lately flowered
with--I mean the volumes that you freehandedly scatter. I console myself
with believing that one or two of your last serial fictions are not
volumes yet. Please hold them not back from soon becoming so. I see you
are drawing a longish bow in the _Cosmopolitan_--but I only read you
when I can sit down to a continuous feast and all the courses. You asked
me in your penultimate--I am talking now of your early-in-the-winter
letter--if I should object to being made a feature of your composed
reminiscences. To which I reply that I only wish that I could enrich
them better. I won't pretend that I like being written about--the sight
of my own name on a printed page makes me as ill (and the sensibility
increases strangely with time) as that of one of my creations makes me
well. I have a morbid passion for personal privacy and a standing
quarrel with the blundering publicities of the age. I wince even at
eulogy, and I wither (for exactly 2 minutes and 1/2) at any
qualification of adulation. But on the other hand I like, I love, to be
remembered by you and I surrender myself to your discretion. I hope your
winter, and Mrs. Howells' and the fairest of daughters's, is rich and
full and sane. How you must miss the Boy. I go abroad soon and hope to
see him in Paris. When do you do the same? Yours always, my dear
Howells,