MS Mrs Clare Roels
My dear Christabel
Your Face seems to me very effective, I long to hear more of it.1 I suppose it will not be like the Face story I heard of, which has a terrible ending. I hope you will go on and get me out of the eerieness it gives me. Thanks for the promise of Handley Mills [sic], I shall be so glad of it, for poor Gertrude’s reading, she is so much more ill than usual, and a book of that kind is such a pleasure to her. Forms and ceremonies are coming in, but who asks next time for I have no questions to look at?2 Mrs Mercier has sent me her book, the Mother Church. I think she has not distinguished detail from principle enough to make it really good. It is such a pity to do the Prayer book by saying – this was written in 350, and this in 1560- and this in 1661 your mind gets confused and you lose all sense of the comparative value of the parts of the Service- and she rushes into ‘the colours’ before we understand the great principles of symbolism. However it is a nice book, and I daresay will be very useful, but I thought it would have been better.
your affectionate
C M Yonge
Saturday
I never thanked you for the Photo- It is very odd that as they make me fierce, they make you sentimental- also as lies on the table it is like a Murillo boy!
Handley Mills came and very pretty to look at thank you.