I know you do not like writing letters, but still I think you might have written me a line in answer, or acknowledgment of my letter[56] to you from Dieppe.  I am thinking of a story to be called “The Silence of Frank Harris.”

I have, however, heard during the last few days that you do not speak of me in the friendly manner I would like.  This distresses me very much.

I am told that you are hurt with me because my letter of thanks to you was not sufficiently elaborated in expression.  This I can hardly credit.  It seems so unworthy of a big strong nature like yours, that knows the realities of life.  I told you I was grateful to you for your kindness to me.  Words, now, to me signify things, actualities, real emotions, realised thoughts.  I learnt in prison to be grateful.  I used to think gratitude a burden.  Now I know that it is something that makes life lighter as well as lovelier for one.  I am grateful for a thousand things, from my good friends down to the sun and the sea.  But I cannot say more than that I am grateful.  I cannot make phrases about it.  For me to use such a word shows an enormous development in my nature.  Two years ago I did not know the feeling the word denotes.  Now I know it, and I am thankful that I have learnt that much, at any rate, by having been in prison.  But I must say again that I no longer make roulades of phrases about the deep things I feel.  When I write directly to you, I speak directly:  violin variations don’t interest me.  I am grateful to you.  If that does not content you, then you do not understand, what you of all men should understand, how sincerity of feeling expresses itself.  But I dare say the story told of you is untrue.  It comes from so many quarters that it probably is.

I am told also that you are hurt[57] because I did not go on the driving-tour with you.  You should understand, that in telling you that it was impossible for me to do so, I was thinking as much of you as of myself.  To think of the feelings and happiness of others is not an entirely new emotion in my nature.  I would be unjust to myself and my friends, if I said it was.  But I think of those things far more than I used to do.  If I had gone with you, you would not have been happy, nor enjoyed yourself.  Nor would I. You must try to realise what two years cellular confinement is, and what two years of absolute silence means to a man of my intellectual power.  To have survived at all—­to have come out sane in mind and sound of body—­is a thing so marvellous to me, that it seems to me sometimes, not that the age of miracles is over, but that it is just beginning; that there are powers in God, and powers in man, of which the world has up to the present known little.  But while I am cheerful, happy, and have sustained to the full that passionate interest in life and art that was the dominant chord of my nature, and made all modes of existence and all forms of expression