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You should have seen after the rain was over yesterday, little old men appeared from nowhere in peaked hats, crawling over the wild hill looking for snails. They carried coloured handkerchieves which frothed. Flowers are coming up everywhere on the hill. I just went for a glance to-day—not more than five steps high, and there were 8 kinds there.

Caterina came yesterday (the pretty one from the laundry). She brought me vivid pink carnations and two eggs in cotton wool for a present. But I felt she could afford to. All the same, she was fearfully nice—laughing, gay, beautiful, healthy creature. She says May here is magnifique beyond anything. The whole place is covered with flowers, and all the little kinds pour les distillations are out—tiny hyacinths, violets, small roses.

Well, now I'll tell you about myself. I feel marvellously better. All that remains is my cough. It has bad moments still, but that terrible boiling sensation when I can't stop, I haven't had once since you left. Nor have I once had a temperature. I get short of puff if I cough, but my lungs don't hurt at all. Think of last October 14th. S. B. came, and at night I had fever in that North Room and thought I was going to die.

[Later.]

I am in the middle of a review of Brett-Young which I will post to the office to-morrow unregistered. I am very glad that K. M. is liked a bit. She wishes she was more worthy. That's sincere from my soul. But whenever I'm praised I always want to fall on my knees and ask God to make me a better girl. It just takes me that way.

That Wing! What a fellow he is! I wish you could bring him in May, but he would eat his way out of a suitcase just as you were in the Customs Office. How I would love to kiss him!

Yesterday ended in such a blazing glory of a sunset that page 254 I was quite frightened. It really was the most superb day, and at night (all the windows open) the sea sounded like an immense orchestra; I could truly hear violins, especially, and great rushing passages for the wood-wind. The skeeters drank my blood last night, and I'm awfully bitten to-day—but to death—both hands, one face, and one leg.

I wish I was more of a stoic about under-linen, perfumes, little boxes for a toilet table, delicate ribbons and silk stockings. But the older I grow, the more exquisite I want to be, fine down to every minutest particular, as a writer, as a talker, in my home, in my life, and in all my ways—to carry it all through. Even now sometimes, when I write to you, a word shakes into the letter that I don't mean to be there, an old windfall, you know, from a tree in an orchard I've long forsaken…. Do you know what I mean? It is my illness which has made me so bad-tempered at times. Alas! one can't fight without getting battle-stained, and, alas! there have been so many occasions when I've never had time to wash away the stains or renew myself.

A year ago I thought I was going to die, and I think I was. And now I know we are going to live. Don't let's forget how S. has helped. I really think I should just have died in that room upstairs if he had not taken me by the hand, like you take a little girl who is frightened of a dog, and led me up to my pain and showed it me and proved it wasn't going to eat me. That was what he did.

Oh dear, on the wild hill to-day I found thyme and rosemary—it reminded me of Bandol in the early morning. Very large astonished daisies are beginning to flower everywhere, even in the gravel. The cotton-pods are huge. Exquisite pale yellow butterflies flutter by. The Marygolds unclosèd are.

P.S.—A huge fawn-coloured rat just ran over the verandah. Tell Wing.