utterly fascinating to me always—­still I need rest, quiet, and often complete solitude.  Friends have come to see me here for a day, and have been delighted to find me like my old self, in all intellectual energy and sensitiveness to the play of life, but it has always proved afterwards to have been a strain upon a nervous force, much of which has been destroyed.  I have now no storage[58] of nervous force.  When I expend what I have, in an afternoon, nothing remains.  I look to quiet, to a simple mode of existence, to nature in all the infinite meanings of an infinite word, to charge the cells for me.  Every day, if I meet a friend, or write a letter longer than a few lines, or even read a book that makes, as all fine books do, a direct claim on me, a direct appeal, an intellectual challenge of any kind, I am utterly exhausted in the evening, and often sleep badly.  And yet it is three whole weeks since I was released.

Had I gone with you on the driving tour, where we would have of necessity been in immediate contact with each other from dawn to sunset, I would have certainly broken off the tour the third day, probably broken down the second.  You would have then found yourself in a pitiable position:  your tour would have been arrested at its outset:  your companion would have been ill without doubt:  perhaps might have needed care and attendance, in some little remote French village.  You would have given it to me, I know.  But I felt it would have been wrong, stupid, and thoughtless of me to have started an expedition doomed to swift failure, and perhaps fraught with disaster and distress.  You are a man of dominant personality:  your intellect is exigent, more so than that of any man I ever knew:  your demands on life are enormous:  you require response, or you annihilate:  the pleasure of being with you is in the clash of personality, the intellectual battle, the war of ideas.  To survive you, one must have a strong brain, an assertive ego, a dynamic character.  In your luncheon parties, in the old days, the remains of the guests were taken away with the debris of the feast.  I have often lunched with you in Park Lane and found myself the only survivor.  I might have driven on the white roads, or through the leafy lanes, of France, with a fool, or with the wisest of all things, a child:  with you, it would have been impossible.  You should thank me sincerely for having saved you from an experience that each of us would have always regretted.

Will you ask me why then, when I was in prison, I accepted with grateful thanks your offer?  My dear Frank, I don’t think you will ask so thoughtless a question.  The prisoner looks to liberty as an immediate return to all his ancient energy, quickened into more vital forces by long disuse.  When he goes out, he finds he has still to suffer:  his punishment, as far as its effects go, lasts intellectually and physically just as it lasts socially:  he has still to pay:  one gets no receipt for the past when one walks out into the beautiful air....