I feel I have spent years and years at this hotel. I have eaten hundreds of wings of hotel chickens, and only God knows how many little gritty trays with half cold coffee pots on them have whisked into my room and out again. It doesn't matter. Really, one arrives at a rather blissful state of defiance after a time, when nothing matters and one almost seems to glory in everything. It rains every day. The hotel window sills have sprouted into very fat self-satisfied daisies and pitiful pansies. Extraordinary Chinamen flit past one on the stairs followed by porters bearing their boxes, which are like large corks; the lift groans for ever. But it's all wonderful—all works of the Lord—and marvellous in His sight. John and I went for a drive in the Bois the other day. Elizabeth, it was divine. That new green, that grass; and there were cherry trees in flower—masses of adorable things.

Are you working? I won't ask you what you are reading. Do you sometimes get tired of books—but terribly tired of them? Away with them all! It being a cold night, lately, John and I lay in one bed each with an immense Tomb of Eckermann's Conversations with Goethe perched on our several chests. And when my side of the bed began to shake up and down

J.: “What in God's name are you laughing at?”
K.: “Goethe is so very, very funny!'
But it hadn't ‘struck’ John.