About Joyce, and my endeavour to be doubly fair to him because I have been perhaps unfair and captious. Oh, I can't get over a great great deal. I can't get over the feeling of wet linoleum and unemptied pails and far worse horrors in the house of his mind—He's so terribly unfein; page 174 that's what it amounts to. There is a tremendously strong impulse in me to beg him not to shock me! Well, it's not very rare. I've had it before with men and women many times in my life. One can stand much, but that kind of shock which is the result of vulgarity and commonness, one is frightened of receiving. It's as though one's mind goes on quivering afterwards… It's just exactly the reverse of the exquisite rapture one feels in for instance that passage which ends a chapter where Proust describes the flowering apple trees in the spring rain.

Elizabeth has returned to the Châlet. In minute black breeches and gaiters she looks like an infant bishop. When she has talked about London and the literary ‘successes’ I am thankful to be out of it. But Elizabeth ‘fascinates’ me; and I admire her for working as she is working now, all alone in her big châlet. She is courageous, very. And for some reason the mechanism of Life hardly seems to touch her. She refuses to be ruffled and she is not ruffled. This is incomprehensible to me. I find it devilish, devilish, devilish. Doors that bang, voices raised, smells of cooking, even steps on the stairs are nothing short of anguish to me at times. There is an inner calm necessary to writing, a sense of equilibrium which is impossible to reach if it hasn't its outward semblance. But I don't know. Perhaps I am asking for what cannot be.

I must end this letter. The sun has been out to-day and yesterday, and although there is about seven foot of snow and great icicles hang from the window frames it is warm, still, delicious. I got up to-day and I feel I never want to go to bed again … this air, this radiance gives one a faint idea of what spring must be here—early spring. They say that by April the snows have melted and even before all is quite gone the flowers begin…