14th August.
P.S. The hand of Providence guided me, after finishing the preceding, to
which the present is postscriptal, to keep it over a few days instead of
posting it directly: so possible I thought it that I might have
something more definite to add--and I was a little nervous about the way
I had left our question. Behold then I _have_ then to add that I have
just received your letter of August 4--which so simplifies our situation
that this accompanying stuff becomes almost superfluous. But I have let
it go for the sake of the interest, the almost top-heavy mass of
response that it embodies. Let us put it then that all is for the moment
for the best in this worst of possible worlds; all the more that had I
not just now been writing you exactly as I am, I should probably--and
thanks, precisely, to the lapse of days--be stammering to you the
ungraceful truth that, after I wrote you, my tale of terror did, as I
was so more than half fearing, give way beneath me. It _has_, in short,
broken down for the present. I am laying it away on the shelf for the
sake of something that _is_ in it, but that I am now too embarrassed and
preoccupied to devote more time to pulling out. I really shouldn't
wonder if it be not still, in time and place, to make the world sit up;
but the curtain is dropped for the present. All thanks for your full and
prompt statement of how the scene has shifted for you. There is no harm
done, and I don't regard the three weeks spent on my renewed wrestle as
wasted--I have, within three or four days, rebounded from them with such
relief, vaulting into another saddle and counting, D.V., on a straighter
run. I have _two_ begun novels: which will give me plenty to do for the
present--they being of the type of the "serious" which I am too
delighted to see you speak of as lifting again ... its downtrodden head.
I mean, at any rate, I assure you, to lift _mine_! Your extremely,
touchingly kind offer to find moments of your precious time for
"handling" something I might send you is altogether too momentous for me
to let me fail of feeling almost ashamed that I haven't something--the
ghost or t'other stuff--in form, already, to enable me to respond to
your generosity "as meant." But heaven only knows what may happen yet!
For the moment, I must peg away at what I have in hand--biggish stuff, I
fear, in bulk and possible unserialisability, to saddle you withal. But
thanks, thanks thanks. Delighted to hear of one of your cold waves--the
newspapers here invidiously mentioning none but your hot. We have them
all, moreover, _rechauffees_, as soon as you have done with them; and we
are just sitting down to one now. I dictate you this in my shirtsleeves
and in a draught which fails of strength--chilling none of the pulses of
yours gratefully and affectionately,