[No surviving envelope]
This is the first time I have ever had three letters in anything like such rapid succession (June 5, 7 and 8) and I want you to know how much I prize the honour. It is perhaps as well that I did not answer your letter of the 7th yesterday, before receiving that of the 8th this morning. IEliot, Henry Ware, Jr. (TSE's brother)TSE reads his second detective story;b7 should have done, but had to read the ms. of my brother’s second detective story (I wish that it was better, and am excogitating what to say about it).1 Of course, I was rather intoxicated by the first letter, and sobered by the second. I think that for the present at least you are right. When, a little while ago, I wrote that it would be better for you not to write to me in England till further notice – I hope you understood my motives: I was thinking not only of the possibility of letters going astray during a period of temporary addresses and possible visits, but of a kind of decorum. It is not, in my mind, a question of ‘fairness’ towards anyone but yourself. It is not reserve, but respect for you, that makes me refrain from imparting any details of my affairs during this present and coming time; just as something has made me refrain from telling you – or even my counsellors – any more about the past than was necessary – I would rather risk putting myself in an unfavourable light than risk putting myself in too favourable a light – not that I wish to exonerate myself.
It is sufficient, for the present, that you should have some notion of the amount of control under which I place myself in my usual letters, and that I consciously wish, in every letter, to ‘let myself go’. And so, as you request now (and I only took your other letter as a ‘permission’) I will not answer your question or conjecture; only to say that it was a moment which revealed to me a little, how much I have all this time been suppressing. Indeed, I was not surprised to get this note from you this morning. ThereHale, EmilyTSE's love for;x2defined by TSE;c5 is one sentence which I wish you might put differently: where you speak of ‘the man who loves me in more ways than one’. To me, my way (of loving you) seems to me the only way, that most people’s way of love is merely a bundle (at best) of a few of the fragments of love, but that the real thing is one inseparable whole. The ordinary respectable way is to begin with an egotistic infatuation which does not see the object clearly, and which settles down into habit and affection. Of course there are worse separations than that, but that seems ignominious enough. AndHale, EmilyTSE's love for;x2shows TSE true meaning of tenderness;c4 by ‘tenderness’ I mean something more than people ordinarily mean, something in which (I am not crossing out for any reason except that this machine is too much for me) passion and affection and protectiveness and possessiveness are merged at the deepest level – with admiration and adoration, and always a self-sacrificing element, when necessary, which will put the other person’s interests far beyond one’s own.
There, perhaps I have already exceeded my terms of reference – though I have tried to put this in an impersonal and theoretic way; so no more for the present. I hope the paragraph above does not sound boastful! I attribute my knowledge of the matter not to my own exalted nature, but to knowing you.
I hope to find a letter in Cambridge telling me where to write next, and whether I may telephone.
1.Not published.
3.HenryEliot, Henry Ware, Jr. (TSE's brother) Ware Eliot (1879–1947), TSE’s older brother: see Biographical Register.