Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: TO MRS. SITWELL Tl 3 Menton, November 13, I MUST pour out my disgust at the absence of a letter; my birthday nearly gone, and devil a letter ? I beg pardon. After all, now I think of it, it is only a week since I left. I have here the nicest room in Mentone. Let me explain. Ah ! there ‘s the bell for the table d'hdte. Now to see if there is any one conversable within these walls. In the interval my letters have come; none from you, but one from Bob, which both pained and pleased me. He cannot get on without me at all, he writes; he finds that I have been the whole world for him; that he only talked to other people in order that he might tell me afterwards about the conversation. Should I ? I really don’t know quite what to feel; I am so much astonished, and almost more astonished that he should have expressed it than that he should feel it; he never would have said it, I know. I feel a strange sense of weight and responsibility. Ever your faithful friend, R. L. S. To Mrs. Sitwell The history of the scruples and ideas of duty in regard to money here expressed is set forth and further explained in retrospect in the fragment called Lay (Morals, written in 1879. The Walt Whitman essay is not that afterwards printed in (Men and Books, but an earlier and more enthusiastic version. Mr. Dowson, I believe, was the father of the unfortunate poet, the late Mr. Ernest Dowson. His acquaintance was the first result of Stevenson’s search for
any one conversable
in the hotel. MENTON, Sunday [November 30, 1873]. MY DEAR FRIEND, ? To-day is as hot as it has been in the sun; and as I was a little tired and seedy, I went 1873 down and just drank in sunshine. A strong wind has T’ 23 risen out of the west; the great big dead leaves from the roadside planes scuttled about and cha…
