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The Letters of Katherine Mansfield: Volume I

Very late Friday night — September 1916 —

Very late Friday night
September 1916

To J. M. Murry

I shall not be able to post this letter until I have heard from you where you are going to sleep after to-night. Nevertheless I must write and tell you….

That it only dawned on me this evening that perhaps you will not be here again for a long time … that you won't see the dahlias of this year again reflected in your mirror … and that the lemon verbena in a jar on my table will be all withered and dry. As I thought that, sitting, smoking in the dusky room, Peter Wilkins [a black kitten] came in with a fallen-all-too-fallen leaf in his mouth, and I remembered that the Michaelmas daisies were out and, lo! it was autumn.

Is it just my fancy—the beauty of this house to-night? This round lamp on the round table, the rich flowers, the page 73 tick of the clock dropping into the quiet—and the dark outside and the apples swelling and a swimming sense of deep water. May brought me this evening some of this year's apples… “Good to eat.” They are small and coloured like pale strawberries. I wish that you were with me. It is not because you are absent that I feel so free of distraction, so poised and so still. I feel that I am free even of sun and wind, like a tree whose every leaf has ‘turned.’