The Henson Journals

[204]

Wednesday, September 12th, 1923.

I motored my guests to Lanchester, where we visited the parish church, getting back to the Castle in time for lunch. After lunch, the Bishop of South Florida played bowls with me. M r Justice Darling & his daughter arrived in the afternoon, and I met them at the station. Before dinner I took the judge for a walk in the Park.

After dinner Miss Diana Darling sang some Scottish songs divinely. She reminded me of Olive, whose singing moved me so strangely some years ago when she was unmarried, & I was Dean of Durham.

James Foreman, until recently my butler's boy, wrote me a pathetic appeal for money, wherewith to pay for a suit of clothes. I wrote to him saying that if the bill were sent to me, I would discharge it, but that I should not repeat this performance.

The question of one's duty in these cases is not easy to answer. For while, on the one hand, one's feelings incline one to yield the assistance asked for, yet, on the other hand, one's reason never fails to protest that there is no slight probability that by thus yielding one is both emptying one's pockets injudiciously, and actually withdrawing from the life of one's beneficiary the very disciplinary stroke which was needed. Nor may one exclude, in these evil times, the contingency of fraud, which is allured, strengthened, & directed by one's complaisance.

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