I have been indoors all day (except for posting your letter) and I feel greatly rested. Juliette has come back from a new excursion into the country, with blue irises—do you remember how beautifully they grew in that little house with the trellis tower round by the rocks?—and all sorts and kinds of sweet-smelling jonquils…. The room is very warm. I have a handful of fire, and the few little flames dance on the log and can't make up their minds to attack it…. There goes a train. Now it is quiet again except for my watch.

Monday: Have you read Our Mutual Friend? Some of it is really damned good. The satire in it is first chop—all the Veneering business par exemple could not be better. I'd never read it before and I'm enjoying it immensely. Ma Wilfer is after my own heart. I have a huge capacity for seeing ‘funny’ people, you know, and Dickens does fill it at all times quite amazingly.

As I write to you I am always wanting to fly off down little side paths and to stop suddenly and to lean down and peer at all kinds of odd things. My Grown-Up Self sees us like two little children who have been turned out into the garden. There we are hand in hand, while my G.U.S. page 115 looks on through the window. And she sees us stop and touch the gummy bark of the trees, or lean over a flower and try to blow it open by breathing very close, or pick up a pebble and give it a rub and then hold it up to the sun to see if there is any gold in it.

As I write I feel so much nearer my writing self—my ‘Pauline’ writing self—than I have since I came. I suppose because what I said about the children had a ‘little atom bit’ of Kezia in it.