Best Beloved, I have your little letter lying close, and feel dumb when I try to answer.  You with your few words make me feel a small thing with all my unpenned rabble about me.  Only you do know so very well that I love you better than I can ever write.  This is my first letter of the new year:  will our letter-writing go on all this year, or will it, as we dearly dream, die a divine death somewhere before autumn?

In any case, I am, dearest, your most happy and loving.

LETTER LII.

My Dearest:  Arthur and the friend went off together yesterday.  I am glad the latter stayed just long enough after you left for me to have leisure to find him out human.  Here is the whole story:  he came and unbosomed to me three days ago:  and he said nothing about not telling, so I tell you.  As water goes from a duck’s back, so go all things worth hearing from me to you.

Arthur had said to him, “Come down for a week,” and he had answered, “Can’t, because of clothes!” explaining that beyond evening-dress he had only those he stood in.  “Well,” said Arthur, “stand in them, then; you look all right.”  “The question is,” said his friend, “can I sit down?” However, he came; and was appalled to find that a man unpacked his trunk, and would in all probability be carrying away his clothes each night to brush them.  He, conscious of interiors, a lining hanging in rags, and even a patching somewhere, had not the heart to let his one and only day-jacket go down to the servants’ hall to be sniffed over:  and so every evening when he dressed for dinner he hid his jacket laboriously under the permanent layers of a linen wardrobe which stood in his room.

I had all this in the frankest manner from him in the hour when he became human:  and my fancy fired at the vision.  Graves with a fierce eye set on duty probing hither and thither in search after the missing coat; and each night the search becoming more strenuous and the mystery more baffling than ever.  It had a funny likeness to the Jack Raikes episode in “Evan Harrington,” and pleased me the more thus cropping up in real life.

Well, I demanded there and then to be shown the subject of so much romance and adventure:  and had the satisfaction of mending it, he sitting by in his shirt-sleeves the while, and watching delighted and without craven apologies.

I notice it is not his own set he is ashamed of, but only the moneyed, high-sniffing servant-class who have no understanding for honorable poverty:  and to be misunderstood pricks him in the thinnest of thin places.

He told me also that he brought only three white ties to last him for seven days:  and that Graves placed them out in order of freshness and cleanliness night after night:—­first three new ones consecutively, then three once worn.  After that, on the seventh day, Graves resigned all further responsibility, and laid out all three of them for him to choose from.  On the last three days of his stay he did me the honor to leave his coat out, declaring that my mendings had made it presentable before an emperor.  Out of this dates the whole of his character, and I understand, what I did not, why Arthur and he get on together.