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Even if you never came I cannot but love you more for the evening and the night and the morning I have spent thinking that you are coming. It was Sunday, so I could not send you a telegram until to-day. I somehow—Oh, how did I?—got through last evening by sitting in the salon among unreal fantastic people and sewing and talking. For I knew I would not sleep. I knew I would not sleep. What drowsy bliss slept in my breast! I hardly dared to breathe.

A woman here told me how to buy our stores and what to pay and how to make soup with 2 sous worth of bones, and what day the woman with good apples was at the market and how to manage une femme de menage. I heard. I dared not look at her. I felt my smiles chasing in my eyes. I saw the villa—perhaps a cactus near the gate—you writing at a little table, me arranging some flowers and then sitting down to write too. Both of us gathering pine cones and driftwood and bruyère for our fire. I thought of what I would have ready for you, soup and perhaps fish, coffee, toast, because charbon de bois, which is much cheaper than coal, makes lovely toast, I hear,—a pot of confitures, a vase of roses…. And then I saw us waking in the morning and putting on the big kettle and letting in the femme de menage. She hangs her shawl behind the kitchen door. “Vous savez, il fait beau.”