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The Letters of Katherine Mansfield: Volume I

Monday night — October 27, 1919

Monday night
October 27, 1919

A picture. Figurez-vous your Wig on the verandah in all the clothes she has, topped with the woolly lamb, and with her cherry sunshade up, under a green fly-net! It is so perishingly cold to-day—a wind like ice. But for the first time I seem to have weapons to fight it with, and I am as snug as can be. As I walked into the garden wearing the woolly lamb, I leaned on the green gate which is my confessional and said to the daisy who remarked on it: “Oui, c'est la jaquette militaire de mon mari qu'il a porté page 269 pendant les trois hivers qu'il était au front. Le khaki était affreusement sale; alors je l'ai … etc….” If the daisy had been Catherina the same histoire would have been recounted: I am fascinated by these ideas sometimes. I saw you in this British-warm tucking your pocket-book away, pulling on immense gloves, and going off somewhere by motor-car….

At break of day I went through all the paper and had a good read of it. The printers seems to get a bit scrimpy at times and will cut the noses off the words: it's very annoying…. Who wrote What is Bolshevism? It's one of those reviews that begins with a bouquet and then gradually takes the flowers back again. And sentences like “It is of course impossible to estimate the number of people etc.” are footle. Of course, it is. L. M. might try. At the end the reviewer decides to give him back a stalk or two—but … it's a bad style of reviewing, don't you think?