I do hope your tooth is better. Why have we got teeth? Or why haven't we brass ones. I cling to mine but I feel they will all go one day and the dentist is such a terrifying animal. I hate to think of you in the clutches of that chair. I always think of dear Tchehov in Nice, with toothache, where he says “I was in such pain I crawled up the wall.” That just describes it. It is maddening and exhausting to have toothache; I do hope yours is over.

Where is your little house! It is somewhere—but where? Sometimes I think it must be in the branches of a tree. Do let me know. I think you are very wise not to take a big one. Little houses are always best. A house is like an ark—one rides the flood in it. Little ones bob over the waves and can rest on the extreme tops of mountains much better than great big ones. Can I be official Godmother to the garden? I should like to Startle you with the most superb things and to send you seeds from the far corners of the earth and have a boronia plant below the studio window. Do you know the scent of boronia? My grandma and I were very fond of going to a place called McNab's Tea Gardens and there we used to follow our noses and track down the boronia bushes. Oh, how I must have tired the darling out! It doesn't bear thinking about.

I hope G.'s show goes off well. It's not a very good moment for selling pictures, or so I should think. There is an unrest in every one. It's between light and dark, between winter and spring. People are neither open or page 187 closed. The moment to catch them is just a little bit later. I think the time for a picture show or to publish a book is in the first days of real spring or just at the beginning of Autumn. We are more alive then than at any other time. We are in the mood to receive. It seems to me one ought to link up all one's projects as much as possible with the earth's progress. The more I know of life the more I realise it is profoundly influenced by certain laws, no matter how many people ignore them. If we obey them our work goes well; we get our desire. It's like studying the tides before we put out to sea in our fishing boat. We are all sailors, bending over a great map. We ought to chose the weather for our journey.

M. is here. Two days was enough to disgust him with Switzerland. He will stay here now, and at the end of March we are going into a flat which we have found. Awfully nice—high up—but absurdly furnished, like the Arabian Nights by Poiret. Very sumptuous and exotic. When you come to see me a little black boy with a pineapple on his head will open the door.

This is an excellent hotel. We have two rooms at the end of a passage, cut off from the rest of the hotel, with a bathroom and masses of hot water. Rooms cost from 13 francs a day. There is a lift, of course, and we can eat on the premises. If I were you I'd come here at Easter. All rooms have hot and cold water. After 7 months in that cleanliness I feel water and soap are the great necessities. M. and I have settled down according to programme, as we always do. We work, play chess, read, make our tea and drink it out of our small bowls. I can do nothing but get up and lie down, of course, and Manoukhin says in three weeks I shall have a real reaction and then be able to do even less than that for the next three weeks. It's rather like waiting to have an infant— new born health. My horrid time ought to be just over by Easter.

I must begin work. Seven stories sit on the doorstep. One has its foot inside. It is called The Fly. I must page 188 finish it to-day. This is a hard moment for work—don't you feel? It's hard to get life into it. The sun is not up yet. Oh Spring, hurry, hurry! Every year I long more for Spring.

It's a pig of a day—a London fog outside the windows and I have to pull my stockings on. Think of pulling one's stockings on like winking—without noticing even. Can that happen to me again?