Autograph Letter Signed ('H Belloc') from a sixteen-year-old Hilaire Belloc to his childhood sweetheart Minna Hope, describing in detail how 'matters' have 'come to a scarcely endurable crisis'.

12mo, 6 pp. Bifolium and single leaf. Text clear and complete. Fair, on aged and lightly-creased paper. Closely and neatly written. An important and revealing letter, written while Belloc was still at school. Belloc's biographer Joseph Pearce, describes his 'infatuation' with his first love Mina Hope, 'the centre of his universe [...] more important than France, whereas England was merely "the country of Minna" [phrase quoted from a Belloc letter of 1887]' Towards the beginning of the letter he writes 'Now first of all as to what you say of my being down rather, with the idea that a change in your behaviour towards me had also been a change in friendship, you were right, only you see I naturally thought so, because there had been a long break of a year between your letters and we had not met for two years. But what you say in your letter makes me a bit sad, because, you know, if what you say of your difficulty in expressing a thing to me is true it makes it a little lonely for me'. States that 'at home things are not very bright [...] I made one friend only I lost a great deal when I found that something whether of my morbidness or selfishness or whatever it was had prevented any real friendship between us [...] I did not choose my friends, my mind has found them and will hold to them and having but two, one was enough to lose.' He is 'puzzled' when she says 'that such an indifference as you feel is a think you were aiming for and yet you hope that I will not have the same experience'. His view is that 'Perhaps after all a seeming apathy and indifference is nothing more than the change from morbidness to a healthier state and when one finds that one dosn't [sic] mope any more one feels the least bit sorry; it is not that ones thoughts are less strong or of less importance but that they are less turned on self and more wholesome: I say it in all fear and trembling, as it has happened to me.' In the latter part of the letter describes how 'at home matters had come to a scarcely endurable crisis', and he 'had the happiness to be batterried [sic] and assaulted by a worthy boy who has four inches in his favour but no guard; when we stopped he was the most sorry'.