I wish you would come in now, this moment, and let us have tea and talk. There is no one here except my cough. It is like a big wild dog who followed me home one day and has taken a most unpleasant fancy to me. If only he would be tame! But he has been this last week wilder than ever. It is raining but it's not winter rain.

This early Spring weather is almost too much to bear. It wrings one's heart. I should like to work all day and all night. Everything one sees is a revelation in the writing sense.

Have you ever owned a cat who had kittens? Or have you ever watched them from the first moments of their life? On April 5th Charlie was delivered of two—He was so terrified that he insisted on my being there and ever since they have lived in my room. Their eyes are open already. Already they smile and smack the spectator in page 226 the face (the spectator being their mother). One is like a minute tigress, very beautiful, and the other is like a prehistoric lizard—in very little. Their tiny paws are pink and soft like unripe raspberries. I am keeping a journal of their first days. It is a pity that human beings live so remote from all animals….

F. writes me that there is a ‘rumpus’ between me and—them, I suppose. I see this ‘rumpus’—don't you? a very large prancing, imaginary animal being led by F.—as Una led the Lion. It is evidently bearing down upon me with F. for a Lady Godiva on its back. But I refuse to have anything to do with it. I have not the room now-a-days for rumpuses. My garden is too small and they eat up all one's plants—roots and all.