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The Letters of Katherine Mansfield: Volume I

Friday — December 5, 1919

page 311
Friday
December 5, 1919

Oh, your new book has just come. It looks superb. I'll read it to-night. It looks terrific. And then I looked at the title-page and decided. No, he's forgotten, and then saw that To My Wife, I had a moment of such ancient bliss you cannot conceive. No, that To My Wife, To My Wife is written on every wave of the sea at the moment. It's to me just as though I'd been going home from school and the Monaghans had called after me and you—about the size of a sixpence—had defended me and p'raps helped me to pick up my pencils and put them back in the pencil box. (I'd have given you the red one.)

I had by the same post an awfully nice sympathetic letter from Grant Richards asking me for a book. He can have White Roses when ready. I feel better to-day. The brandy was a great point. “Very Old Pale Cognac”— one can't help pitying it. Yet that it should have such fire!! My temperature was only just on 100 last night. Now I've got to climb back again, curse it.

The sea comes rolling in—rolling in. There's not a sound but my pen. L. M. is somewhere out in the village. Catherina came to see me yesterday guarding against the infection de la fièvre with a shawl, but an immense shawl! which she kept held up to her lips till I made her smile and then forgot all about it. I was asking her if she was going to help with the tea-room that Mme. Littardi is opening. “Ah non, Madame, ce n'est pas mon métier, vous savez” —and here she flushed lightly and put her hands in her pockets—“je suis née pour le repassage…e—t puis … c'est ma passion!”

There's the secret of her charm.