While the family were in Dorking, where they had taken a house for the summer, Mrs. Strong received a letter of sympathy from Mrs. Stevenson's old friend, Henry James, which is so characteristic that I am impelled to quote it:
"I have been meaning each day to write to you again and tell you how much, in these days, I am with you in thought. I can't sufficiently rejoice that you are out of town in this fearful heat, which the air of London, as thick as the wit of some of its inhabitants, must now render peculiarly damnable. I rejoice, too, that you have, like myself, an old house in a pretty old town and an old garden with pleasant old flowers. Further, I jubilate that you are within decent distance of dear old George Meredith, whom I tenderly love and venerate. But after that, I fear my jubilation ceases. I deeply regret the turn your mother's health has taken has not been, as it so utterly ought to be, the right one. But if it has determined the prospect of the operation, which is to afford her relief, I hope with all my heart that it will end by presenting itself to you as 'a blessing in disguise.' No doubt she would have preferred a good deal less disguise, but, after all, we have to take things as they come, and I throw myself into the deep comfort of gratitude that her situation has overtaken her in this country, where every perfect ministration will surround her, rather than in your far-off insular abyss of mere--so to speak--picturesqueness. I should have been, in that case, at the present writing, in a fidget too fierce for endurance, whereas I now can prattle to you quite balmily; for which you are all, no doubt, deeply grateful. Give her, please, my tender love, and say to her that if London were actually at all accessible to me, I should dash down to her thence without delay, and thrust myself as far as would be good for any of you into your innermost concerns. This would be more possible to me later on if you should still be remaining awhile at Dorking--and, at any rate, please be sure that I shall manage to see you the first moment I am able to break with the complications that, for the time, forbid me even a day's absence from this place. I repeat that it eases my spirit immensely that you have exchanged the planet Saturn--or whichever it is that's the furthest--for this terrestrial globe. In short, between this and October, many things may happen, and among them my finding the right moment to drop on you. I hope all the rest of you thrive and rusticate, and I feel awfully set up with your being, after your tropic isle, at all tolerant of the hollyhocks and other garden produce of my adopted home. I am extremely busy trying to get on with a belated serial--an effort in which each hour has its hideous value. That is really all my present history--but to you all it will mean much, for you too have lived in Arcadia! I embrace you fondly, if you will kindly permit it--every one; beginning with the Babe, so as to give me proper presumption, and working my way steadily up. Good-bye till soon again.