haven't been in the least afraid, but have faced and assimilated
and represented for all you're worth.

I have lived, you see, wholly out of the inner circle of political
life, and yet more or less in wondering sight, for years, of many
of its outer appearances, and in superficial contact--though this,
indeed, pretty anciently now--with various actors and figures,
standing off from them on my quite different ground and neither
able nor wanting to be of the craft of mystery (preferring, so to
speak, my own poor, private ones, such as they have been) and yet
with all sorts of unsatisfied curiosities and yearnings and
imaginings in your general, your fearful direction. Well, you take
me by the hand and lead me back and in, and still in, and make
things beautifully up to me--ALL my losses and misses and
exclusions and privation--and do it by having taken all the right
notes, apprehended all the right values and enjoyed all the right
reactions--meaning by the right ones, those that must have
ministered most to interest and emotion; those that I dimly made
you out as getting while I flattened my nose against the shop
window and you were there within, eating the tarts, shall I say,
or handing them over the counter? It's to-day as if you had taken
all the trouble for me and left me at last all the unearned
increment or fine psychological gain! I have hovered about two or
three of your distinguished persons a bit longingly (in the past);
but you open up the abysses, or such like, that I really missed,
and the torch you play over them is often luridly illuminating. I
find my experience, therefore, the experience of simply reading
you (you having had all t'other) veritably romantic. But I want so
to go on that I deplore your apparent arrest--Saint Simon is in
forty volumes--why should Margot be put in one? Your own portrait