| Description | Dear Mary
I very sincerely hope that after these two very trying hours (during which you must have been rather glad you were not in 'the Chair') you & Mrs Ned felt that the best was done that could be done for our excellent but impossible little friend the Treasurer. I think, if you won't be angry with me for saying so, that in the great kindess of your hearts you both did not quite realize (to use an Americanism) that we were not dealing with ordinary matter for Council minutes or with any matter in which personal considerations could find expressions but with a formal business like Trust deed defining, not for the moment but as a permanent charter, the conditions under which we, the Trust hold, are responsible to the public for, and must use for the public good certain monies & property vested in us. In such a document the several functions of the various officers [-] have to be laid down in plain business-like language - in which sentiment, which in direct personal dealing with individual officers must & should find a large place, has no raison d'etre. All this Rossiter does not feel and he is sore to the quick that the rough & ready and wholly inadequate original document should be set aside under entirely new conditions, but then he is an infinitely less reasonable and sensible being than either of you. My hair still stands on end when I remember the views about finance (and his own financial practises) which he quite innocently developed a short time back views on which Jabez Balfour et hoc genus omne have acted with the results we know; and when I see an officer in a responsible position proposing in writing & therefore deliberately that a certain house shall be bought & paid for & yet remain 'his property' - not his home but his property, till his death - and who by the bye is now satisfied because we are to rent it from him instead of buying it, not seeing that as he is barred from selling or bequeathing it, it is no longer in effect his property, and what he has, viz lifelong occupancy is exactly what he refused with so much warmth.
However all's well that ends well only I was sorely very sorely tried, inside, when he curtly & unhesitatingly flung back at us the one thing which it had been possible to do in the Trust deed to mark, and only to mark, our sense of his great services. That was the acme of gracelessness!
Meanwhile to one thing we must make up our minds. He will never see that the normal & the abnormal cannot be harnessed together nor the precise & the vague nor law with arbitrariness - nor that the Institution in which he is now a Trustee and a salaried officer is not the same as the one we formed a few years ago in the Camberwell shop.
I was so wearied with trying to be amiable & yet standing firm where need was that I was unfit for my Richter Concert (the last & I have been to none) & had to give it up.
I trust Signor is better today
In haste
Yours affectionately
Fred Leighton |