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The Letters of Katherine Mansfield: Volume II

August 8, 1921

Forgive this paper. I am at the top of the house and there is no other here. I am on the wide balcony which leads out of my dressing room. It's early morning. All the treetops are burnished gold, a light wind rocks in the branches. The mountains across the wide valley are still in sunlight: on the remote drowsy peaks there are small cloud drifts—silvery. What I love to watch, what seems to become part of one's vision, though, are the deep sharp shadows in the ravines and stretching across the slopes. But one couldn't imagine a more marvellous view or one more perfect to live by. I watch it from early morning until late at night, when bats are out and booming moths fly for one's hair. With intervals…

Please please never think I need money like that. I can always get money. I can always go into some wonder place and hold out my hat or sell id. worth of boracic ointment for 2/6, net profit 2/5, or—— money has no terrors for me nowadays. And besides I am making some —and it's only a question of my own activity how much I make. At present I am 30 down—and two nuns have just come with needlework made by infants in their convent. The dear creatures (I have a romantic love of nuns) my two gentle columbines, blue-hooded, mild, folded over—took little garments out of a heavy box and breathed on them and I spent 27/- on minute flannel jackets and pinnies for Ernestine's sister's first not-yet-born baby.

page 126

The butcher's bill on red slaughtered butcher's paper is quite unpaid, and now I can't pay it. But you see that's what I am like about money, never to be pitied or helped!

What is your picture, the one you thought of in your bath? Yes, I find hot baths very inspiring, so does my cousin Elizabeth. She reads Shakespeare in hers. Her love of flowers is really her great charm. Not that she says very much, but every word tells. A man couldn't discover it in her—he wouldn't realise how deep it is. For no man loves flowers as women can. Elizabeth looks coolly at the exquisite petunias and says, in a small faraway voice, “They have a very perfect scent.” But I feel I can hear oceans of love breaking in her heart for petunias and nasturtiums and snapdragons.

I must stop this letter and get on with my new story. It's called At the Bay and it's (I hope) full of sand and seaweed, bathing dresses hanging over verandas, and sandshoes on window sills, and little pink ‘sea’ convolvulus, and rather gritty sandwiches and the tide coming in. And it smells (oh, I do hope it smells) a little bit fishy.