Dear Jane,

It is with only nominal apologies and nothing more than a twinge of embarrassment, that I begin the draft of yet a third letter to you in as many days, reassuring myself with the thought, that to begin is not necessarily to complete, and even the complete letter can be saved in the computer's memory without being mailed.

Besides, I have learned that the window within which I am able to collect my thoughts is brief and narrow; if I do not write when the thought is pressing, it will be, most likely, irretrievably lost.  Specifically, there are three issues that occurred to me after I mailed my second letter: rivalry, loyalty and anonymity.

I was startled to realize that you criticise me in terms identical with those used by my (other) sister who addressed me, when she was perhaps eight years old, "Du Missgeburt!" (You monster) and who told me just a week ago, at age seventy-seven, what she has repeated in one form or another for the past seventy years, that although in her own way she likes me, she finds my presence intolerable because my being "so goddamned arrogant" makes her feel inferior.

It is, I think, a common misapprehension that one should earn the love of ones family by ones actions which are presumably under ones control, one seeks to ingratiate oneself by making gifts, whereas in fact one is loved or loathed, liked or disliked for what one _is_, and what one is one can obviously do nothing about.