To W. D. Howells

34 De Vere Gardens, W.
January 28th, 1898.

My dear Howells,

Too long, too long have I delayed to thank you for your last good letter; yet if I've been thus guilty the fault—as it were! the deep responsibility—is largely your own. It all comes from that wonderful (and still-in-my-ears reverberating) little talk we had that morning here in the soft lap, and under the motherly apron, of the dear old muffling fog—which will have kept every one else from hearing ever—and only let me hear, and have been heard! I mean that the effect of your admirable counsel and comfort was from that moment to give me the sense of being, somehow, suddenly, preposterously, renewingly and refreshingly, at a kind of practical high pressure which has—well, which has simply, my dear Howells, made all the difference! There it is. It is the absurd, dizzy consciousness of this difference that has constituted (failing other things!) an exciting, absorbing feeling of occupation and preoccupation—and thereby paralysed the mere personal activity of my pen....

I hope you have by this time roared—and not wholly with rage and despair!—through the tunnel of your dark consciousness of return. I dare say you are now quite out on the flowery meads of almost doubting of having been away. This makes me fear your promise to come back—right soon—next summer—may even now have developed an element of base alloy. I rushed off to see Mrs. Harland the instant I heard she was back, and got hold of you—and of Mildred—for five minutes (and of all the handsomest parts of both of you) in her talk. She had left a dying mother, however, and her general situation has, I fear, its pressure and pinch. What an interest indeed your boy's outlook must be to you! But, as you say—seeing them commence—! Well, they never commenced before; and the pain is all in us—not out of us. The thing is to keep it in. But this scrawl—or sprawl—is about all my poor hand can now sustainedly perpetrate; if I continue I shall have to clamour for a mount—a lift—my brave boy of the alphabetic hoofs. But I spare you those caracoles. I greet you each again, affectionately, and am yours, my dear Howells, intensely,

HENRY JAMES.