Inna’s Reviews > Letters, Fictions, Lives: Henry James and William Dean Howells > Status Update

That is bad grammar but sovereign truth.

I write and find greater happiness in writing than I ever did; and this, my dear old friend, is clumsily leading up to the hope and belief that you will soon begin writing again.

If that might have been she would have supported this pain better than I; women have more courage, more strength than men; she would have known what to do, and I do not yet.

Life still has both hands on your shoulders & will insist on showing you how much she is still concerned with you.

Boston is a beautiful town and Cambridge a wonder of leaves and grass -- but with graves under them everywhere."

I could not have believed that life still held an experience so sweet for me.

What he does is simply to show you those people mainly on the outside, as you mainly see people in the world, and to let you divine them and their ends from what they do and say.

As for social conditions, predicaments, orders of things, where shall we find the like of the wonders wrought in The Awkward Age?

I have a theory that it is not well to penetrate every recess of an author's meaning. It robs him of the charm of mystery, and the somewhat labyrinthine construction of Mr. James's later sentences lends itself to the practice of the self-denial necessary to the preservation of this charm. What I feel sure of is that he has a meaning in it all, and that by and by, perhaps when I least expect it, I shall surprise his

Why should he want to picture such life?"

"Perhaps because it exists."