The Documents in the Case by Dorothy L. Sayers

and synthetic dyes, and I can put up with synthetic camphor and synthetic poisons, but when it comes to synthetic gland-extracts like adrenalin and thyroxin, I begin to get worried. Synthetic vitamins next, I suppose, and synthetic beef and cabbages — and after that, synthetic babies. So far, however, they don’t seem to have been able to make synthetic life — the nearest they have got is stimulating frog-spawn into life with needles. But what of the years to come? If, as the bio-chemists say, life is only a very complicated chemical process, will the difference between life and death be first expressible in a formula and then prisonable in a bottle?’
    This is a jolly kind of letter to write to you, old girl, on this auspicious occasion, but this everlasting question of life and the making of life seems to haunt me — and it is, after all, not so remote from the problem of marriage. We can pass it on and re-continue it, but what is it? They say now that the universe is finite, and that there is only so much matter in it and no more. But does life obey the same rule, or can it emerge indefinitely from the lifeless? Where was it, when the world was only a dusty chaos of whirling gas and cinders? What started it? What gave it the thrust, the bias, to roll so ceaselessly and eccentrically? To look forward is easy — the final inertia, when the last atom of energy has been shaken out of the disintegrating atom — when the clocks stand still and time’s arrow has neither point nor shaft — but the beginning!
    One thing is certain. If I begin to think like this, I shall never write another best-seller. Heaven preserve us from random speculation! Our own immediate affairs are as important as the loves of the electrons in this universe of infinitestimal immensities, and as far as we are concerned . .
    [The remainder of this letter, being of a very intimate nature, is not available.]
The Same to the Same
    Smith’s Hotel, Bloomsbury 25.2.29
    Dearest,
    Just a hasty line to say that I have had to leave Whittington Terrace on account of a very unfortunate incident, which I will tell you about later on. I am here for a few days till I can get my belongings moved out and warehoused somewhere pro tem.
    It is all extremely tiresome. However, it only means that we shall have to do our house-hunting a little earlier than we expected. I think I had better run up to Kirkcudbright and have a yap with you about it, if I can get away from publishers and agents.All my love, Jack
Agatha Milsom to Elizabeth Drake
    15, Whittington Terrace, Bayswater 25.2.29Dear Madam,
    You will probably be very angry at what I am going to say, but I feel it is my duty to warn you against Mr John Munting. Girls do not always know how men go on behind their backs, and it is only right they should be told by those who have had unfortunate experience of these men’s real character.
    You may think that Mr Munting is honourable, but he has been turned out of this house on account of indecent behaviour, and your eyes ought to be opened to his goings-on. You may believe me because I have the best right to speak of what I know. I have no doubt he will tell you that this is all false and try to pull the wool
    over your eyes, but I have proof of what I say, and if you should want further evidence you can write to Mr Harrison at this address, and he will tell you that every word is true.
    I am sending you this warning for your good, because you ought not to marry a man like that; he is not fit to marry a decent woman. You are young, and you do not know what the consequences may be of marrying a man of depraved habits. This is one incident I can tell you about of my own knowledge, but there are others, or why does he so often come in late at night?
    Do not tell him I have written to you, as it is not a pleasant thing to have to do, and naturally I do not care to write or talk about it in detail. But ask him why he was ordered out of the house, and do not believe the excuses he