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The Letters of Katherine Mansfield: Volume I

Friday — October 24, 1919

Friday
October 24, 1919

When you talk about Wing, I don't know what it is, something in all you tell me goes to my heart. I see him as he used to lie, in a kitten coma, while you kissed his nose.

page 266

Never shall we have such an adorable kitten again. When he slept on our bed, too, and wouldn't settle down (you remember), would dive off and swim about under the cupboard and up the screen-pier.

(Oh, the midges!!! There are three.)

Your Sunday letter brought you and the house to me very, very clearly. It was wonderful how you conveyed the quality of the day—the one thing happening after another thing—in a silence.

I know what you mean about people babbling, even though je ne suis pas une silencieuse, moi. But the years one has spent, sitting with a strained smile trying to appear of the party, in the know … what foolishness, what waste of time!

But on those rare occasions when you and I talk, I do—I do feel the heavens opening and our thoughts like angels ascending and descending. Time, peace, freedom from anxiety—these things must be ours. Time to be silent in and to talk in. But especially that last. The strain we have lived under! No one will know. Isn't it queer what a cold indifferent world this is really? Think of the agony we've suffered. Who cares? Who dreams? If we were not ‘set apart’ for ever before, this has been enough to do it. We could not, knowing what we know, belong to others who know not. If I can only convey this difference, this vision of the world as we see it! Tchehov saw it, too, and so I think did Keats.