I hope you are having _là-bas_ a less odious year than we _poverini_, who only see it go on from bad to worse, the deluge _en permanence_, with mud up to our necks and a consequent confinement to the house that is like an interminable stormy sea voyage under closed hatches. I have now spent some ten or eleven winters mainly in the country and find myself reacting violently at last in favour of pavements or street lamps and lighted shop fronts--places where one can go out at 4 or at 5 or at 6, if the deluge has been "on" the hour before and has mercifully abated. Here at 5 or 6 the plunge is only into black darkness and the abysmal _crotte_ aforesaid. I don't say this to discourage you, for I am sure you have shop-fronts and pavements and tramcars highly convenient, and also without detriment to the charming-looking house of which you send me the likeness. It is evidently a most sympathetic spot, and I shall positively try, on some propitious occasion, to knock at its door. I envy you the drop into Italy that you will have by this time made, or come back from, after meeting your daughter. I send _her_ my kindest remembrance and the same to her father.
I catch the distracted post (_so_ distracted and distracting at this British Xmas-tide) and am, dear Laura Wagnière, your affectionate old friend,
As usual my silence has become so dense and coagulated that you might cut monstrous slabs and slices off it for distribution in your family--were you "maliciously" disposed! But my whole security--as my whole decency (so far as claim to decency for myself goes)--is that we are neither of us malicious, and that I have often enough shown you before that, deep as I may seem to plunge into the obscure, there ever comes an hour when, panting and puffing (as even now!) my head emerges again, to say nothing of my heart. I have treasured your petit mot from a point of space unidentified, but despatched from a Holland-America ship and bearing a French and a Pas-de-Calais postage-stamp (a bit bewilderingly)--treasured it for the last month as a link with your receding form: the recession of which makes me miss your presence in this hemisphere out of proportion somehow to the--to any--frequency with which fortune enables me to enjoy it. But I still keep hold of the pledge that your retention (as I understand you) of your Paris apartment constitutes toward your soon coming back--and really feel that with a return under your protection and management absolutely guaranteed me, I too should have liked to tempt again the adventure with you; should have liked again to taste of the natal air--and perhaps even in a wider draught than you will go in for. However, I have neither your youth, your sinews, nor your fortune--let alone your other domestic blessings and reinforcements--and somehow the memory of what was fierce and formidable in our colossal country the last time I was there prevails with me over softer emotions, and I feel I shall never alight on it again save as upborne on the wings of some miracle that isn't in the least likely to occur. The nearest I shall come to it will be in my impatience for your return with the choice collection of notes I hope you will have taken for me. You have chosen a good year for absence--I mean a deplorable, an infamous one, in "Europe," for any joy or convenience of air or weather. The pleasant land of France lies soaking as well as _this_ more confessed and notorious sponge, I believe;--and I have now for months found life no better than a beastly sea-voyage of storms and submersions under closed hatches. We rot with dampness, confinement and despair--in short we are reduced to the abjectness, as you see, of literally _talking_ weather. You will see our Nephew Bill, I trust, promptly, in your rich art-world là-bas, and I beg you to add your pressure to mine on the question of our absolutely soon enjoying him over here. I am under a semi-demi-pledge to go to Paris for a fortnight in April--but it would be a more positive prospect, I think, if I knew I were to find you all there. Give my bestest love to Lilla, please, and my untutored homages to the Daughters of Music. Try to see Howells chez lui--so as to bring me every detail. Feel thus how much I count on you and receive from me every invocation proper to this annual crisis. May the genius of our common country have you in its most--or least?--energetic keeping. Yours, my dear Thomas, ever,