citizenship towards which you might be pointing Baxter Court--you
have not even imagined it. I am not being sentimental. Don't
misunderstand. Don't fancy, for instance, that I am exhorting you to
go slumming. Deliberately or not, you took a wrong impression from my
first letter. You can't mistake this. Reach after a few of the
realities. Why not shut your questioning mind a while and open your
soul? _Live_ a little--begin to realize that there is a world outside
yourself. Try to get beyond the view-point of a child. And, if I have
not angered you beyond words, let me know how you get on.

The unconventionality of this correspondence, you see, is not all on
one side. If you found English to your taste in what I wrote before,
this time you have plain truths, perhaps less satisfactory. You are
not in a position to decide some matters. I do not ask you to let me
decide them for you. I have only tried to indicate some reasons why
you must wait before you act. And I think it has made you angry. One
has to risk that. Yesterday I could not have imagined sending a letter
like this to anybody. But it goes--and to you. I ask you to answer
it. I think you owe me that. It hasn't been exactly easy to write.

One more thing--don't trust letters to stand between you and the toy in
the dressing-table drawer. Any barrier there, to be in the least
effective, will have to be of your own building.

GEOFFREY McBIRNEY.


About a month after the above letter had been received, on September
10th, Geoffrey McBirney, dashing down the three flights of stairs in
the Parish House from his quarters on the top floor, peered into the