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 is an extraordinarily patient and detached and touch-upon-touch thing; but the book itself really constitutes an image of you by its strength of feeling and living individual tone.  An admirable portrait of a lady, with no end of finish and style, is thereby projected, and if I don’t stop now, I shall be calling it a regular masterpiece.  Please believe how truly touched I am by your confidence in your faithful, though old, friend,

Henry James.

My dear and distinguished friend Lord Morley sent me the following letter of the 15th of September, 1919, and it was in consequence of this letter that, two months afterwards, on November the 11th, 1919, I began to write this book: 

FLOWERMEAD, princes road, Wimbledon park, S.W., September 15th, 1919.

Dear Mrs. Asquith,