If you were here, as it happens you wouldn't have listened to a word of what I've been saying. Your eyes, green with envy would have been fixed on, hypnotised by two very old apothecary's jars on my dressing table. Murry, who is a very good nose-flattener has been gazing at them for days and yesterday he bought them. They are tall milk-white jars painted with a device in apple green, faint yellow and a kind of astery pink. They have gold tops. On one in exquisite lettering is the word Absinthii, on the other Theriaca. We intend to keep pot pourri in them during our lives and after our deaths we intend to put our ashes in them. I'm to be Absinthii and M. Theriaca. So there they stand, our two little coffins, on the dressing table and I've just sent M. out for some fresh flowers to deck them with as I've no pot-pourri. But if I am well enough to nose-flatten at Easter, you and I must go off with our little purses in our little hands and glare!

Are you aware that there is an extremely fine Punch and Judy in the Luxembourg? In a theatre of its own. Stalls 2d., Pit 2d. too. The audience screams frightfully and some are overcome and have to be led out. But there it is. We had better buy some comfits from the stall under the chestnut tree and go there, too. I believe there is a one-eyed thief who comes in, rather, looks round a corner, who really is awful. M. said ‘he let out a yell himself’ and the little boy next to him roared. You know the kind of eye. [A drawing of it.]

page 198

The weather is glorious here. Warming, sunny. So mild one hears the voices of people in the open air, a sound I love in Spring, and all the windows opposite mine stand wide open, so that I see at one the daughter sewing with her mother, at another the Japanese gentleman, at another two young people who have a way of shutting their bedroom window very quickly and drawing the curtain at most unexpected moments. … I can't go out, though, not even for a drive. I am and shall be for the next ten days rather badly ill. In fact, I can only just get about at all. But Manoukhin says the worse one is at this time the better later on. So there's nothing to be done but to be rather dismally thankful.

Later. M. has just come in with 2 bunches of anemones, two small tea plates and a cake of rose thé soap. We have had our tea and I'm going back to bed. What is a nuisance is I cannot work for the moment and Shorter has ordered 13 stories, all at one go, to be ready in July. So they are in addition to my ordinary work. I shall have to spend a furious May and June.

The chestnuts are in big bud. Don't you love chestnut buds? I shall have a look at them on Friday. I think they are almost the loveliest buds of all.

Oh, your cinerarias. I wish I could see them. Do you know the blue ones, too! And the faint, faint pink kind? Mother loved them. We used to grow masses in a raised flower bed. I love the shape of the petals. It is so delicate. We used to have blue ones in pots in a rather white and gold drawing room that had green wooden sunblinds. Faint light, big cushions, tables with ‘photographs of the children’ in silver frames, some little yellow and black cups and saucers that belonged to Napoleon in a high cupboard and someone playing Chopin—beyond words playing Chopin. … Oh how beautiful Life is. How beautiful! A knock at my door. The maid has come in to close the shutters. That's such a lovely gesture. She leans forward, she looks up and the shutters fold like wings.