J M Barrie to - 1921

dani1923

<br /> I tried my best to transcribe this letter. I probably got some words wrong. I changed all the “tho’s” to “though” to make it more understandable and I put a question mark to the words I just couldn’t make out. After “circumstances of” I couldn’t make out the rest of the sentence, so I just skipped to the next sentence “I should like by and by”: <br /> <br /> Dear Lady Buxton, <br /> <br /> I have just read your very kind letter, but I have been thinking a great deal about you since the 19th and feeling sorrowful for you. I am very glad you have a daughter. Michael was son and daughter to me, and all I have been doing of my (?) in the past ten years is trying to be father and mother to him.  I cared for him a great deal too much, but the circumstances of—<br /> <br /> I should like by and by to be allowed to see Rupert’s sister, with the hope that she might come in time to look upon me as a friend. I suppose I know Rupert more intimately than you know Michael. There is not any subject I would pretend to know much about, but I know more about boys than any other, and one of my grand ambitions for Michael was that he should form a (?) friendship with someone who was worthy of it. This was slow in coming, for there were a few at Eton for whom he had a warm attachment continued at Oxford and elsewhere, Rupert was the one great friend of his life. He has often talked to me about this, sometimes for hours, far into the night, and appearing to do it after he had gone to bed, and the last letter I had from him on the day they died, was largely about your boy. Rupert treated me quite differently from any other of my (?) boys’ friends. They were always polite and edged away from me, as of a different (?), but he took for granted that Michael’s friend should be mine also. Michael knew me and my ways as no other person did, and we was more (?) than (?) could tell by the way Rupert took me in hand. I shall never forget the glee with which he told me one day that Rupert was going to ask me to dinner all alone, and how I hoped Rupert would (?) how he did and also came to me. I was very proud of his treating me in that way, and Michael knew I liked it, and I daresay that (?) of (?) chuckled (?) it for they could be very gay though neither was facing life lightly. They were either (?) gay or very (?) as they walked together to Sandford. <br /> My (?) sympathy to Rupert’s mother and his relatives.<br /> Yours Sincerely,<br /> J.M. Barrie <br />