It is still awfully difficult to credit what has happened and what is happening in Ireland. One can't get round it. This shooting, Beatrice, this incredible shooting of people! I keep wondering if Ireland really minds. I mean really won't be pacified and cajoled and content with a few fresh martyrs and heroes. I can understand how it must fill your thoughts, for if Ireland were New Zealand and such a thing had happened there … it would mean the same for me. It would really (as unfortunately George-out-of-Wells would say) Matter Tremendously…. Dear woman, I am a little afraid of jarring you by writing about the whole affair, for I know so little (except what you've told me) and I've heard no discussion or talk.

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It is Sunday evening. Sometimes I feel I'd like to write a whole book of short stones and call each one Sunday. Women are far more ‘sensitive’ to Sundays than to the moon. Does Sunday mean to you something vivid and strange and remembered with longing? … Sunday is what these talking people call a rare state of consciousness, and what I would call—the feeling that sweeps me away when I hear an unseen piano. Yes, that's just it, and now I come to think of it, isn't it extraordinary how many pianos seem to come into being only on Sunday. Lord! someone, heaven knows where—starts playing something like Mendelssohn's Mélodie in F.—or, miles away, some other one plays a funny little gavotte by Beethoven that you—simply can't bear. I feel about an unknown piano, my dear, what certain men feel about unknown women—no question of love—but simply “an uncontrollable desire to stalk them” (as the Crown Prince on Big Game Shooting says). Not that there is even the ghost of a pianner here. Nothing but the clock and the fire and sometimes a gust of wind breaking over the house. This house is very like a house left high and dry. It has the same ‘hollow’ feeling. The same big beams and narrow doors and passages that only a fish could swim through without touching. And the little round windows at the back are just like portholes. Which reminds me—there has been a calf lying under the dining room window all day. Has anyone taken it in? It has been another misty Highland-Cattle - Crossing - the-Stream - by-Leader day and the little calf has lain shivering and wondering what to do with its far too big head all the day long. What time its Mother has guzzled and chewed away and looked into the distance and wondered if she were too fat to wear a tussore coat like any Christian woman. Oh, Lord, why didst Thou not provide a tucking away place for the heads of Thy Beasts as Thou didst for Thy Birds? If the calf were only something smaller I could send my soul out wrapped in a non-existent shawl and carrying a non-existent basket lined with non-existent flannel and page 71 bring it in to the dead out kitchen fire to get warm and dry….

I must stop this letter. Write to me again very soon…