/* Ever your all-affectionate, dear Edith, HENRY JAMES. */
/# The "bêtises" were certain Baconian clues to the authorship of Shakespeare's plays, which Mr. Bruce Porter had come from America to investigate. #/
I rejoice to hear from you even though it entails the irritation (I brutally showed you, in town, my accessibility to that) of your misguided search for a sensation. You renew my harmless rage--for I hate to see you associated (with my firm affection for you) with the most provincial _bêtises_, and to have come so far to do it--to _be_ it (given over to a, to _the_ Bêtise!) in a fine finished old England with which one can have so much better relations, and so many of them--it would make me blush, or bleed, for you, could anything you do cause me a really _deep_ discomfort. But nothing can--I too tenderly look the other way. So there we are. Besides you have _had_ your measles--and, though you might have been better employed, go in peace--be measly no more. At any rate I grossly want you to know that I am really ever so much better than when we were together in London. I go on quite as well as I could decently hope. It's an ineffable blessing. It's horrible somehow that those brief moments shall have been all our meeting here, and that a desert wider than the sea shall separate us over there; but this is a part of that perversity in life which long ago gave me the ultimate ache, and I cherish the memory of our scant London luck. My brother, too, has taken a much better turn--and we sail on the 12th definitely. So rejoice with me and believe me, my dear Bruce, all affectionately yours,
I am deeply touched by your tender note--and all the more that we have need of tenderness, in a special degree, here now. We arrived, William and Alice and I, in this strange, sad, rude spot, a week ago to-night--after a most trying journey from Quebec (though after a most beautiful, quick, in itself auspicious voyage too,) but with William critically, mortally ill and with our anxiety and tension now (he has rapidly got so much worse) a real anguish.... Alice is terribly exhausted and spent--but the rest she will be able to take must presently increase, and Harry, who, after leaving us at Quebec, started with a friend on a much-needed holiday in the New Brunswick woods (for shooting and fishing), was wired to yesterday to come back to us at once. So I give you, dear Grace, our dismal chronicle of suspense and pain. My own fears are the blackest, and at the prospect of losing my wonderful beloved brother out of the world in which, from as far back as in dimmest childhood, I have so yearningly always counted on him, I feel nothing but the abject weakness of grief and even terror; but I forgive myself "weakness"--my emergence from the long and grim ordeal of my own peculiarly dismal and trying illness isn't yet absolutely complete enough to make me wholly firm on my feet. But _my_ slowly recuperative process goes on despite all shakes and shocks, while dear William's, in the full climax of his intrinsic powers and intellectual ambitions, meets this tragic, cruel arrest. However, dear Grace, I won't further wail to you in my nervous soreness and sorrow--still, in spite of so much revival, more or less under the shadow as I am of the miserable, damnable year that began for me last Christmas-time and for which I had been spoiling for two years before. I will only wait to see you--with all the tenderness of our long, unbroken friendship and all the host of our common initiations. I have come for a long stay--though when we shall be able to plan for a resumption of life in Irving Street is of course insoluble as yet. Then, at all events, with what eagerness your threshold will be crossed by your faithfullest old