I was simply enchanted with your letter. It came, after a dreadfully bad night, an age-long night which leaves one at the mercy of first impressions next morning. You know the feeling? One lies in a kind of daze, feeling so sensitive—so unbearably sensitive to the exterior world and longing for something ‘lovely’ to happen. The something lovely did happen to me—with your letter. I longed to get up and send you a telegram to your Hotel—just to say how wonderful it had been—but could not get up all day. So, tied to the sofa leg, I thought about it and you.

I am so thankful that the raid is over and that we shan't have another. Oh, don't let us! They are so exhausting, and so wretched, and then when outsiders come in and start boasting on their own account I want to fly into the wilderness and like the dove in that hideous anthem “Bui-ild me a ne-e-est and remain there for Ever at rest.” But otherwise I hate the idea of perpetual wilderness and the dove idea of rest don't appeal to me at all.

We are supposed to have fought our way over to Asheham to-day—hung with our own meat and butter, but I couldn't face it. There seemed to have been so many things to catch and so many changes to make—a sort of government controlled game of musical chairs without any music, very grim. No, I couldn't. So instead I am sitting squeezed up in a corner of this formless room while a man cuts new pinnies for the armchairs and the sommier—lemon yellow ones with dashes of palm trees on them and parrots simply clinging to the branches.

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The parrots have, I think, a quite extraordinary resemblance to M. The tide is very low—at the ebb—in the Redcliffe Road and the sky is the colour of weak cocoa. I wish I could simply disappear—become invisible and find myself somewhere where the light was kinder with a superb new book to read by someone I'd never heard of before. But these are dreams and I must, when this scissor man goes—take my filet to the Fulham Road and do shopping. Oh! Oh! Why hasn't M. £2,500 a year? It would be so lovely to bask in money for a little.

I have a story called “Bliss” in this month's English Review. If you should see it will you really tell me what you think? Is that terre dangereuse? No, not really.

I will send you a cardboard box. I'd adore some flowers. But I think I have several boxes, so I shall send them all—in case they are still as rare at Garsington.