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Here it is simply exquisite weather. We are so high up (5000 feet above the sea) that a cool breeze filters through from Heaven, and the forests are always airy… I can't imagine anything lovelier than this end of Switzerland. Once one loses sight of that hideous Lac Leman and Co. everything is different. Sierre, a little warm sunripe town in the valley, was so perfect that I felt I would like to live there. It has all the flowers of the South and it's gay and ‘queynt’ and full of nightingales. But since we have come up the mountains it seems lovelier still. We have taken a small—not very small—châlet here for two years. It is quite remote—in a forest clearing; the windows look over the tree tops across a valley to snowy peaks the other side. The air feels wonderful but smells more wonderful still. I have never lived in a forest before, one steps out of the house and in a moment one is hidden among the trees. And there are little glades and groves full of flowers—with small ice-cold streams twinkling through. It is my joy to sit there on a tree trunk; if only one could make some small grasshoppery sound of praise to someone— thanks to someone. But who?

M. and I live like two small timetables. We work all the morning and from tea to supper. After supper we read aloud and smoke; in the afternoon he goes walking and I crawling. The days seem to go by faster and faster. One beaming servant who wears peasant ‘bodies’ and full skirts striped with velvet looks after everything. And though the chalêt is so arcadian it has got a bathroom with hot water and central heating for the winter and a piano and thick carpets and sunblinds. I am too old not to rejoice in these creature comforts as well.

The only person whom we see is my Cousin Elizabeth who lives half an hour's scramble away. We exchange Chateaubriand and baskets of apricots and have occasional lovely talks which are rather like what talks in the after-life page 122 will be like, I imagine … ruminative, and reminiscent— although dear knows what it is really all about. How strange talking is—what mists rise and fall—how one loses the other and then thinks to have found the other— then down comes another soft final curtain… But it is incredible—don't you feel—how mysterious and isolated we each of us are—at the last. I suppose one ought to make this discovery once and for all, but I seem to be always making it again.

It seems to me that writers don't acknowledge it half enough. They pretend to know all there is in the parcel. But how is one to do it without seeming vague?

Some novels have been flying up our mountain side lately. … I wish a writer would rise up—a new one—a really good one.

I keep on with my short stories. I have been doing a series for The Sphere, because it pays better than any other paper I know. But now they are done I don't believe they are much good. Too simple. It is always the next story which is going to contain everything, and that next story is always just out of reach. One seems to be saving up for it. I have been reading Shakespeare as usual. The Winter's Tale again. All the beginning is very dull—isn't it? That Leontes is an intolerable man and I hate gentle Hermione. Her strength of mind, too, in hiding just round the corner from him for 15 years is terrifying! But Oh—the Shepherd scene is too perfect. Now I am embedded in Measure for Measure. I had no idea it was so good. M. reads aloud in the evenings and we make notes. There are moments when our life is rather like a school for two! I see us walking out crocodile for two and correcting each other's exercises. But no—not really.

Is this a Fearfully dull letter? I'm afraid it is. I'm afraid “Katherine has become so boring nowadays.”