Other formats

    TEI XML file   ePub eBook file  

Connect

    mail icontwitter iconBlogspot iconrss icon

The Letters of Katherine Mansfield: Volume II

December 1920

page 166

To J. M. Murry

Yesterday I had your letter re the finances of the A. Really, there is nothing to be said. —— has sat on the poor egg to some purpose… The picture of you was lifelike. Your very legs were under the table. I would have known them among a million pairs. But you have a terrible pen for these small drawings. Dear! dear! they are so pathetical. When Mother came back from Switzerland, 1894, she bought me a tie-pin made like a violet and one shut one's eye and looked through it at the Lion of Lucerne!! Your tie-pins all are made of a diamond that's really a tear-drop. I shut one eye and look through at my own little Lion—and my heart faints to see his sweet mane all in knots over his sums.

It's still freezing cold. Oh, I do feel the cold most cruelly. I cannot keep warm. Blankets over my knees, two pairs of everything that one has two of, a fire, soup—nothing saves me. And as soon as the sun so much as shakes his fiery head I feel better. Bogey, when I leave here, it will be to go farther south.

I confess since I've been away this time my need or my wish for people has absolutely fled. I don't know what it is to be lonely, and I love to be solitary.

If my book is to be reviewed in the paper, who is to do it? May I have a say? Of course you can't, and I don't want —— to, because I don't like her work at all at all at all. I'd prefer to have it done by someone who'll—oh, I don't know—Santayana, I prefer. Now I'm not being serious. I mean of course, that's only my wicked preference. But his idea of friendship and mine is alike—that is beaucoup, isn't it?

Did you read in the Times that Shelley left on his table a bit of paper with a blot on it and a flung down quill. Mary S. had a glass case put over same and carried it all the way to London on her knees. Did you ever hear such rubbish!! That's her final give away for me. Did she keep it on her knees while she ate her sangwiches—Did everybody know. Oh—didn't they just. I've done with her.