BR TO CONSTANCE MALLESON, [22 JULY 1917]
BRACERS 19188. ALS. McMaster
Edited by S. Turcon. Reviewed by K. Blackwell

Sunday1^, 2^, 3

My Darling

I was very much relieved by the note4 Miles5 brought me yesterday from you — I felt I had been horrid. I get frightened and unhappy when you go off alone into your world of pain, and I don’t want to complain, so I fall into lecturing you, which is absurd, and not what I really feel at all.

Dakyns6 missed the train this morning, so we couldn’t go far. We went to Epping Forest,7 which I thought beastly, so I made him come home again at once. I am tired, which is a pity — if I were fresh I could be more help to you — But it will be divine to be away with you, on the hills, where it is free and big and unchanging. I don’t really mind very much not seeing you till then — the prospect is so wonderful.

I am going to Garsington8 Tuesday for the night.

Ll. G’s speech and Michaelis’s9 are not very hopeful.  But one must make the best of them.  I like Miles’s Second Thoughts10 very much. Goodnight my dear dear love —

B.

• 1

  [document] Document 200168.

• 2

  [envelope] The Lady Constance Malleson | 6 Mecklenburgh Square | W.C. 1. Pmk: LONDON. W.C. | 1.15 AM | 23 JUL 17

• 3

  [date] Colette wrote “22 July 1917” on the letter.

• 4

  the note Her letter of 21 July in which Colette wrote: “I wasn’t hurt; you weren’t horrid; and if you do lecture me it is no more than I lecture myself” (BRACERS 113039).

• 5

  Miles Miles Malleson, Colette’s husband. For information on him, see BRACERS 19046, n.4.

• 6

  Dakyns Arthur Dakyns (1883–1941). The Dakyns family lived in Haslemere so BR  would have been acquainted with the family. BR had moved to Bagley Wood in 1905; Daykns was at Oxford, where he received his Lit. Hum. in 1906. In a letter of 1 January 1906 to Lucy Donnelly (Auto. 1: 181–2), BR writes: “Arthur has inherited a great deal of his father’s charm. He is the only person up here (except the Murrays) that I feel as a real friend….”

• 7

  Epping Forest North of London, in Essex.

• 8

  Garsington Garsington Manor, near Oxford, the county home of Lady Ottoline and Philip Morrell.

• 9

  Ll. G’s speech and Michaelis’s Georg Michaelis (1857–1936), a Prussian bureaucrat became chancellor in July 1917, succeeding Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg, and served only to October 1917. Michaelis spoke on Germany’s war aims, including no surrender of territory, on Thursday, 19 July, in the German Reichstag. Lloyd George responded in a speech at the Queen’s Hall to celebrate Belgian independence on Saturday, 21 July. He condemned Michaelis’s address, calling it a “facing-all-ways” speech.

• 10

  Miles’s Second Thoughts Miles Malleson, Second Thoughts, on the causes of World War I, was published in 1917 by the National Labour Press, Manchester.  For information on Miles, see BRACERS 19046, n.4.