I'm sitting writing to you in a glade under a pine tree. There are quantities of little squat yellow bushes of a kind of broom everywhere that give a sweet scent and are the humming houses of bees. M. and I have been here all day. Now he is climbing up to Montana to buy a large bottle of castor oil! It's sad to feel so completely a creature of air as one does in this forest and yet to find one's insides have ordered a general strike. Such is our awful condition. It's divinely lovely out here, and warm again—with just a light breeze singing in the trees. A little blue sky with puffs of white cloud over the mountains.

Last evening as I sat on a stump watching the herds pass I felt you may take furiously to cows and paint nothing but cows on green lawns with long shadows like triangles from this-shaped tree [a drawing] and end with a very grave cow-complex. I have one. Up till now I have always more than resisted the charm of cows but now it's swep' over me all of a heap, Miss. Insects, too, even though my legs are both bitten off at the knees by large and solemn flies. Do you mind turning brown, too? Or peeling? I had better warn you. These things are bound to happen. And I am hatefully unsociable. Don't page 220 forget that. It's on the cards you may turn frightfully against me here and brain me with your Toby.¹ You see, every day I work till 12.30 and again from 4.30 until supper—every blessed day, Sunday included. Can you bear that? In the mornings we may meet as I go abroad and sit under the trees. But I shall regard you as invisible and you will haughtily cut me. In this way, when we are free, we feel free and not guilty. We can play and look at beetles in peace. I must get the ancient sisters to simplify their ideas of pic-nics though. To-day they brought M. boiled beef and trimmings in a saucepan. It's awful to open such a vessel under the very Eye of our Maker. I like eggs, butter-bread and milk at pic-nics. But M. disagrees. He regards such tastes as female flippancy.

Oh, my story won't go fast enough. It's got stuck. I must have it finished and done with in 10 days' time. Never shall I commit myself again to a stated time. It's hellish.