Dearest Lady
We spent yesterday evening reading the manuscript and [everybody] is interested immensely, some of them deeply thrilled. We shall know [today] whether or not Edith Wyatt is coming.
Now please tell me if you want anything more than a general comment. Do you want the English picked to pieces, and do you care for any specific [page 2] criticisms. Because of course if it is practically finished that is quite different. I rather hope it isn't and that you will let yourself take this book a little less breathlessly at the very end. This doesn't mean that I would wish to change much, but I should like a few things to be different.
It is splendid that you have taken up this theme and my sisters and cousins to whom all your material is absolutely new are much moved by it, so I know the public will be. But to [page 3] me it is you only in spots. Every now and then I catch my breath as I listen and think. "There now, that is really she," but I do wish there were more of those passages. Only perhaps for the general public the book may tell better as it is.
Please write just what you want me to do with this manuscript. If no other change is made, please change the word "officer" -- I found that all the girls thought you meant police officer and [page 4] did not know what "[one?]" meant.
The stories are awfully good and illuminating, especially Olga's.
Is this what started from Edith Wyatt's article, I wonder. I recognized her [Marie Druot?].
Thank you ever so much for sending it.
Yours ever
A Hamilton
I haven't said how much I like certain things about it, the reserve and frankness together. I think you have quite wonderfully escaped using ugly words and using uglier euphemisms. But all that is what we know you would do.
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