Item 26 - Letter from Edwin Montagu to Venetia Stanley

India Office, London.—Is attending a sitting of the Council of India. Describes his unsuccessful attempts to buy her a Christmas present.

TRANSCRIPT:

India Office, Whitehall, S.W.

16. 12. 1911

Dear Miss Stanley

At the risk of being written {1} mad, I am using a dull quarter of an hour at the sitting of the Council of India (oh what a sepulchre) to write what is in my mind.

Forgive eccentricity—everything I say is honest.

I have been trying on this my last day in London to buy you a Xmas present. I had 2 hrs to do it in and I have failed.

I wanted to most awfully but I found it impossible.

I wanted to express our relationship as I understand it at the moment by finding something personal different to anything else you would receive, different to anything I was giving to anybody else, and of a humble kind relying on its personal attractions rather than its intrinsic value for its acceptance.

Well it was hopeless. I hated the shops, I loathed the people who sold and the dirty look of the people who were buying and after turning over helplessly lumps of jade and books, I came away.

The fact of the matter is that the giving of presents is too sacred when they mean much to be trammelled by seasons. And so I abandon my regret to give you a Xmas present and claim a right in substitution to give you one whenever I can find one which I think will be a real message of what I want.

Meanwhile will you take this letter in all its crude flounderings to mean that at this the end of one year and the beginning of the next, I am thinking much of you and hoping for you every sort of happiness and fun.

Yrs
Edwin S. Montagu

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{1} Reading uncertain.