Feb. 3, 1904.


MY DEAR HERBERT,--It seems ages since we said good-bye--yet it is
not a week ago. And now I have been at work all day correcting
exercises, teaching, talking. I have had supper with the boys, and
I have been walking about since and talking to them--the nicest
part of my work. They are at this time of the day, as a rule, in
good spirits, charitable, sensible. What an odd thing it is that
boys are so delightful when they are alone, and so tiresome (not
always) when they are together. They seem, in public, to want to
show their worst side, to be ashamed of being supposed to be good,
or interested, or thoughtful, or tender-hearted. They are so afraid
of seeming better than they are, and pleased to appear worse than
they are. I wonder why this is? It is the same more or less with
most people; but one sees instincts at their nakedest among boys.
As I go on in life, the one thing I desire is simplicity and
reality; pose is the one fatal thing. The dullest person becomes
interesting if you feel that he is really himself, that he is not
holding up some absurd shield or other in front of his shivering
soul. And yet how hard it is, even when one appreciates the
benefits and beauty of sincerity, to say what one really thinks,
without reference to what one supposes the person one is talking to
would like or expect one to think--and to do it, too, without
brusqueness or rudeness or self-assertion.

Boys are generally ashamed of saying anything that is good about
each other; and yet they are as a rule intensely anxious to be
POPULAR, and pathetically unaware that the shortest cut to
popularity is to see the good points in every one and not to shrink