Your Saturday letter has come—the one about the Eye and about my wings. Now I am being an absolute old coddler for your sake and doing everything and feeling ever such a great deal better, So do you do the same. We are the most awful pair I've ever heard of. We'll have to pin notices in our hats and on our chests saying what we've got and then get a couple of walking sticks and tin mugs if this goes on… —Oh dear, you oughtn't to look at anything smaller than a cow.

I have read Le P'tit. It's very good — very well done. I think it's got one fault, or perhaps I am too ready to be offended by this. I think the physical part of Le P'tit's feeling for Lama, is unnecessarily accentuated. I think if I'd written it I wouldn't have put it in at all—not on his side. On hers, yes. But never once on his. Am I wrong, do you think? Yes, of course, I agree it's well done, that part, but I would have left it more mysterious. Lama must do all she does, and Le P'tit must say: “Si tu savais comme je t'aime!” But “lorsqu'un spontané baiser dans l'affolement furieuse de l'instinct chez le jeune homme …” that I don't like.

But the ‘way’ it is done, the ‘method,’ I do very much. Nausicaa has got something very charming too. If he page 138 wasn't a Frenchman he'd be a most interesting chap. But I do find the French language, style, attack, point of view, hard to stomach at present. It's all tainted. It all seems to me to lead to dishonesty—Dishonesty Made Easy—made superbly easy. All these half-words, these words which have never really been born and seen the light, like “me trouble,” “vague,” “tiède,” “blottant,” “inexprimable” (these are bad examples, but you know the kinds I mean) and the phrases and whole paragraphs that go with them—they won't, at the last moment, do at all. Some of them are charming and one is loth to do without them, but they are like certain plants—once they are in your garden they spread and spread and spread, and make a show perhaps, but they are weeds. No, I get up hungry from the French language. I have too great an appetite for the real thing to be put off with pretty little kickshaws, and I am offended intellectually that ‘ces gens’ think they can so take me in.

It's the result of Shakespeare, I think. The English language is damned difficult, but it's also damned rich, and so clear and bright that you can search out the darkest places with it. Also it's heavenly simple and true. Do you remember where Paulina says:

I, an old turtle,
Will wing me to some withered bough
And there my mate that's never to be found again
Lament till I am lost.

You can't beat that. I adore the English language, and that's a fact.