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The Letters of Katherine Mansfield: Volume I

Monday — January 14, 1918

page 100
Monday
January 14, 1918

The Lord took Pity on me to-day and sent me a letter from you. As it was only written on Wednesday I thought that very good. I had been told that letters took 8 days at least! I read it from beginning to end and then from end to beginning—upside down and then diagonally. I ate it, breathed it, and finally fell out of bed, opened the shutters and saw that the day was blue and the sun shining. So Wig put on her clothes and went for a walk round by the Golf Hotel. It was very exquisite, cold in the shadows, but warm in the light. I still have an appalling cold, cough and flat-iron, but your letter was the best medicine, poultice, plaster, elixir, draught I could have had…

A word more about this place. There is a destroyer anchored here close to the Quai, and sheds, etc., erected for the sailors, who spend their time ½ in the urinals, ½ flirting with the girls. Quantities of black soldiers every where. I saw that woman whose husband was in Salonique yesterday. She is quite changed, very made up, but pale, and impudent and horrid. I realised yesterday she is a type for negroes. You remember the lovely geraniums in this garden. They are little scrubby bushes now, with broken bottles and bits of lead piping chucked among them. These hotel people are no good. A widowed mother and two Bragian doughters. And now there are only 2 people here beside me. However, I can't leave. Je n'ai ni la force ni It may improve. Certainly the weather has. I shall be back now, when you get this, in 14 weeks….