Yours to hand, and your remarks about middle-aged spinsters noted. I will try not to be (a) catty; (b) mid-Victorian; (c) always imagining myself to be truly run after. I did not know I was all those things, but, being a modern woman and a successful novelist, no doubt you are quite right. Also, of course, you are quite right to speak your mind. As you say, married life should be based on mutual frankness.

In return, may I just hint that there are some sides of life which I, as a man, may possibly know more about than you do, merely through having lived longer and knocked about more. I assure you I can size up some types of people pretty well. However, it may give you pleasure to learn that Mrs. Harrison, at any rate, is not out for my scalp. She has read Deadlock and is disgusted with its coarseness and cynicism, How do I know? Because I was in Mudie’s when she went in to change it. The girl said, no, it wasn’t a very nice book and she was afraid at the time Mrs. Harrison wouldn’t care for it, and would she like the latest Michael Arlen? Which she did.

Our place really looks very jolly now; I wish you could come and see it. The Picasso is over the studio fireplace and the famille rose jar is in my sitting-room, and so are the etchings. They give my surroundings quite a distinguished-man-of-letters appearance. I wish I could get rid of this damned Life and get back to my own stuff, but I’m being too well paid for it, that’s the devil of it. Never mind⁠—I’ll pretend I am the Industrious Apprentice, working hard so as to be able to marry his master’s daughter.

Glad the book seems to be working itself out amiably. For God’s sake, though, don’t overdo the psychoanalytical part. It’s not your natural style. Don’t listen to that Challenger woman, but write your own stuff. The other kind of thing wants writing (forgive me) fearfully well if it’s to be any good, and even then it is rather dreary and old-fashioned. Glands, my child, glands are the thing, as Barrie would say. Prenatal influences and childhood fears have gone out with compulsory Greek.

A Don who encountered a Maenad
Was left with less wits than the Dean ’ad;
Till the Dean, being vexed by a Gonad,
Was left with less wits than the Don ’ad:
This shows what implicit reliance
We may place on the progress of Science.

Talking of Science, I have brought up all standing by Nicholson’s book on The Development of English Biography. According to him, “pure” biography is doomed, and we are to have the “scientific biography,” which will in the end prove destructive of the literary interest. There are to be nothing but studies of heredity and endocrine secretions, economics and aesthetics, and so on⁠—all specialised and all damned. This is where I get off: I only hope this infernal work will get itself published before the rot sets in. So back to the shop, Mr. Keats!