Your fearfully nice letter makes me wish that instead of upsetting your table you would sit down at mine and drink tea and talk. But I hasten to answer it for this reason. Have you found a publisher for your novel? I know Cobden-Sanderson very well. I should be delighted to write to him about it if you would care for me to do so. He is a publisher who has only been going for a couple of years or so but he has a very good name already… If you care to send him yours I shall ask Middleton Murry to write as well. For I confess, I let him see your novel. Was that a bad breach of confidence? I hope not. He agreed enthusiastically that it ought to be published…

You know, if I may speak in confidence, I shall not be ‘fashionable’ long. They will find me out; they will be disgusted; they will shiver in dismay. I like such awfully unfashionable things—and people. I like sitting on doorsteps, and talking to the old woman who brings quinces, and going for picnics in a jolting little wagon, and listening to the kind of music they play in public gardens on warm evenings, and talking to captains of shabby little steamers, and in fact, to all kinds of people in all kinds of page 157 places. But what a fatal sentence to begin. It goes on for ever. In fact, one could spend a whole life finishing it.

But you see I am not a high-brow. Sunday lunches and very intricate conversations on Sex and that ‘fatigue’ which is even more essential—these things I flee from.

I'm in love with life, terribly. Such a confession is enough to waft Bliss out of the Union¹

I am sending you a post-card of myself and the two knobs of the electric light. The photographer insisted they should be there as well. Yes, I live in Switzerland because I have consumption. But I am not an invalid. Consumption doesn't belong to me. It's only a horrid stray dog who has persisted in following me for four years, so I am trying to lose him among these mountains. But ‘permanently compelled’ Oh—no!