August 22 [1913]

My dear – this shall go to speak with you at Naworth – to give you my love and a kiss as if I was a child or you were. But I have nothing else to urge except to thank you for your letter. Yes for a little time we are alone, but its only a little time. Judith knowing you well & having always before seen your letters would find it very odd to be suddenly debarred them – and on voyages one lives at close quarters – By choice or temperament I never like that – not even with you would I like it that is not always – but only when we wanted to.

But what’s the good of writing like this?

The F. O. cannot yet settle when their blessed commission is to meet itself. It seems their [sic] are some who object to Corfu as a meeting place – but where else? In the meantime I can do not very much – except that Wingate Abyssinia S. Africa fall upon me thick, as it were to take leave – Wingate is in London & to him or in the War Office I have been talking till now.

And the arts & sciences hang to me close.

Well, & why not - with you one can talk over them best – even though the arts by which in my poor opinion Abyssinia should float a little longer, are not yours in detail as in Turkey – yet in the large they are the same, the same ball of interests that O’Connor tosses, or anyone in the places where things are done – And the Somali muddle has been maximised not minimised but by those men in Parliament. & it will tell all over Africa. And I have been writing writing – arms and liquor trade, frontier exchanges - & seven other devils – But really I love them and find them to my mind.

I read with the greatest interest the Round Table on Turkey – a very extraordinary article - & I have still to read Lombard Street.

Why aren’t you here to talk to me of Turkey – the other countries won’t quite yet be folded away –

Or perhaps I shouldn’t talk of Turkey – God knows. And perhaps its just as well you are not here –

And to satisfy the “little devil that beats in you” as you said – well yes things bother me. But I will take philosophy to wife and hug her close –

As for ghosts, only at Rounton have I found one - & he of the 2nd night was a long shadowy woman thing that swept & weft across my bed like a hawk stooping - & said nothing 0 and I didn’t know who the devil she was – but she meant attack and I wanted the light.

My dear – but if from anything that I have written or said you think that you have hurt me, as you say in your letter – you have not hurt me – not at all - you have given me much and all that I can take with both hands and thank God for – and its much, much.

I am the richer fir my friend in pleasure & wisdom & patience – and the more than ever careless of what comes next. These things stay even to graybeards - & the other things if they must go, let them go in the devil’s name – But as I said they trouble a man like me sometimes – and as a matter of fact I have always welcomed them when I could.
Yrs.