The Shiffolds. - He and Bessie are 'glad to good news' of his mother's recovery; hopes she is able to go outside now. The Bottomleys leave on Wednesday; Gordon is 'on the whole a good deal better for his stay in the South'. Bessie and Julian are well; Julian is 'very cheerful, and less likely to be cross and difficult than he was last year'. He was pleased with the 'Italian postcard of the engine' which his grandparents sent him, and asks him to thank them. Thinks 'it will do him good to be in London this Spring, and see something of other children'. Robert and Bessie have finished Dostoevsky's Idiot and are now reading [Austen's] Mansfield Park: 'a considerable contrast'. Was in London yesterday and saw George and Janet briefly; they and their children 'seemed very well and cheerful'.
Last week a Japanese writer, Yone Noguchi, a friend of Gordon Bottomley, came to stay for a night; he teaches English at Tokio, and 'writes English, verse and prose, fairly well. But he is very difficult to understand when he talks, as, like most Japanese, he pronounces very indistinctly' though he was 'several years in England, and ten years in America as a youth, when he was the servant of Joachim Miller, the Californian poet'. He was 'interesting, and talked well' as far as they could understand him, but Robert thinks he 'prefer[s] the educated Chinese to the Japanese'.
