BR TO OTTOLINE MORRELL, [11 DEC. 1911]
BRACERS 17372. ALS. Morrell papers #284, Texas
Proofread by K. Blackwell et al.

<London>
Monday night.1^, 2

My Darling

I enclose 2 letters and a telegram from North, growing more cheerful about his mother as they grow later. — There was nobody else at the Sangers’ except Arthur Dakyns. For some reason we were all very argumentative, but it was pleasant all the same. Sanger has a great belief in the Insurance Bill; as he is an economist I suppose he really understands it. In some things he is not Liberal: he is against Home Rule and Suffrage. He loves the Germans and hates the French, so he has loathed the entente from the beginning. I didn’t hear anything about Dora’s visit to Alys, which I am glad of. We got onto Amber Reeves; Arthur argued that her husband ought not to have married her, because of her not caring for him. We all told him he was too romantic. He is disgusted to hear that she has grown to like her husband; he says it ought to have ended in tragedy. I understand the feeling but I don’t share it. — His behaviour about Miss Mirrlees was tiresome — he is terribly undisciplined, partly owing to his father’s excessive kindness.

Darling how heavenly it will be when you are back and we can have long times of talking and reading. You make me believe in possibilities, in work and otherwise — you fill me with life and hope and faith — faith is so difficult when one has to sustain it unaided. I never heard what you thought of Ross’s poems. His faith is mine, not yours; faith in patient investigation, in reason, in the slow accumulation of beliefs, impelled but not controlled by the vision. My feeling is that you trust insight too blindly, from not having the knowledge and the intellectual experience that show how much it needs to be critically tested. I do not deny that it is the source of everything else, but when insights clash, as they often do, it is not right to let them remain side by side unadjusted. It is odd that you intensify in me even those parts of my faith which you do not share. I feel we are still only at the outer fringe of things — it will take years to talk things out. I feel all the time that our conflicts are inessential; in some ways I feel nearer to you when we speak of them than at any other time: we seem to understand each other so completely. And that is the strongest of all the ties between us — Now I must stop.

Goodnight my Beloved. I love you I love you, with all my mind and soul.

Yours utterly
B

• 1

  [document] Document 000284. Proofread against a colour scan of the original.

• 2

  [envelope] A circled “284”. The Lady Ottoline Morrell | Towneley Villa | Burnley | Lancashire. Pmk: LONDON.W.C. | 2.15 PM | DEC 12 11A