Balliol college, Sep. 8,1892.

My dear Margaret,

Your kind letter was a very sweet consolation to me.  It was like you to think of a friend in trouble.

Poor Nettleship, whom we have lost, was a man who cannot be replaced—­certainly not in Oxford.  He was a very good man, and had a considerable touch of genius in him.  He seems to have died bravely, telling the guides not to be cowards, but to save their lives.  He also sang to them to keep them awake, saying (this was so like him) that he had no voice, but that he would do his best.  He probably sang that song of Salvator Rosa’s which we have so often heard from him.  He was wonderfully beloved by the undergraduates, because they knew that he cared for them more than for anything else in the world.

Of his writings there is not much, except what you have read, and a long essay on Plato in a book called “Hellenism”—­very good.  He was beginning to write, and I think would have written well.  He was also an excellent speaker and lecturer—­Mr. Asquith would tell you about him.

I have received many letters about him—­but none of them has touched me as much as yours.  Thank you, dear.

I see that you are in earnest about writing—­no slipshod or want of connection.  Writing requires boundless leisure, and is an infinite labour, yet there is also a very great pleasure in it.  I shall be delighted to read your sketches.

 Balliol college, Dec. 27th, 1892.

My dear Margaret,

I have been reading Lady Jeune’s two articles.  I am glad that you did not write them and have never written anything of that sort.  These criticisms on Society in which some of us “live and move and have our being” are mistaken.  In the first place, the whole fabric of society is a great mystery, with which we ought not to take liberties, and which should be spoken of only in a whisper when we compare our experiences, whether in a walk or tete-a-tete, or “over the back hair” with a faithful, reserved confidante.  And there is also a great deal that is painful in the absence of freedom in the division of ranks, and the rising or falling from one place in it to another.  I am convinced that it is a thing not to be spoken of; what we can do to improve it or do it good—­ whether I, the head of a college at Oxford, or a young lady of fashion (I know that you don’t like to be called that)—­must be done quite silently.

Lady Jeune believes that all the world would go right, or at least be a great deal better, if it were not for the Nouveaux Riches.  Some of the Eton masters talk to me in the same way.  I agree with our dear friend, Lady Wemyss, that the truth is “the old poor are so jealous of them.”  We must study the arts of uniting Society as a whole, not clinging to any one class of it—­what is possible and desirable to what is impossible and undesirable.