The messages below from Constance Malleson are contained in Gladys Rinder's letter to BR, document .054821, record 79616.

"C.O'N.: It was blessed getting your letter. I was so glad, gladder than I can say about your Roads to Freedom. I came back on Sunday and had tea with Elizabeth [Russell] yesterday. I have two or three jobs under discussion but nothing definite. The rush is as usual awful. I have been worried to death this last month over Marie but she is now in a nursing home having had an operation, and is getting well again. I had a further £2 from Gordon yesterday. Heard Bell speak one day this week but his personality didn't impress me much. I go quite a lot to the gallery at the opera. It is tremendously refreshing at the end of the day.... Your nice friend Grenfell came to Bell's lecture with Litvinoff. What you wrote about keeping in touch with the world is so exactly what I've been thinking lately. I meet so many people who have taken refuge from it by cutting themselves off and becoming selfish. Your picture of the world now is almost identical with Tolstoy's description of the French army after Moscow—a dumb, dying animal. Miles's new volume comes out on Monday, Lady Constance will bring you a copy on Wednesday. I saw G.D.H. Cole dining with his fiancée the other night. I feel we shall none of us ever see C.A. [Clifford Allen] again. I suppose the war will still go on even if France comes out.—end C O'N."

"From G.J.: I have been thinking a good deal about our friend Monsieur Chatsauvage [Colette's nickname for BR] and his new book. He reminds me continually of Tolstoy's Prince Andrei, and also of Count Bezukhov. One is apt to attribute only to foreigners that peculiar charm that comes of a 'highly spiritual and intellectual life'. Chatsauvage certainly has this quality peculiarly developed. I also find in him that terrific concentrated Heraklietos outlook on the world, the 'dry soul' combined with all this[.] [T]here is about his work a terrific simplicity and a childlike loveableness curiously reminiscent of Pierre Bezukhov."