I want to write to you before I begin work. I have been thinking of you ever since I woke up, thinking how much I should like to talk to you. To-day for instance, is such an opportunity. Brett is staying here for a week or so but she has gone up the mountains for the day. And I am the only guest left in this big, empty, dim hotel. It is awfully nice here, my dearest friend. It is full summer. The grasshoppers ring their tiny tambourines, and down below the gardener is raking the paths. Swallows are flying; two men with scythes over their shoulders are wading through the field opposite, lifting their knees as though they waded through a river. But above all it is solitary.

I have been feeling lately a horrible feeling of indifference; a very bad feeling. Neither hot nor cold; lukewarm, as the psalmist says. It is better to be dead than to feel like that; in fact it is a kind of death. And one is ashamed as a corpse would be ashamed, to be unburied. I thought I would never write again. But now that I have come here and am living alone all seems so full of meaning again, and one longs only to be allowed to understand.

Have you read Lawrence's new book? I should like to very much. He is the only writer living whom I really profoundly care for. It seems to me whatever he writes, no matter how much one may ‘disagree,’ is important. And after all even what one objects to is a sign of life in him. He is a living man. There has been published lately an extremely bad collection of short stories—Georgian Short page 224 Stories. And The Shadow in the Rose Garden by Lawrence is among them. This story is perhaps one of the weakest he ever wrote. But it is so utterly different from all the rest that one reads it with joy. When he mentions gooseberries these are real red, ripe gooseberries that the gardener is rolling on a tray. When he bites into an apple it is a sharp, sweet, fresh apple from the growing tree. Why has one this longing that people shall be rooted in life. Nearly all people swing in with the tide and out with the tide again like heavy seaweed. And they seem to take a kind of pride in denying life. But why? I cannot understand.

But writing letters is unsatisfactory. If you were here we would talk or be silent, it would not matter which. We shall meet one day, perhaps soon, perhaps some years must pass first. Who shall say? To know you are there is enough. (This is not really contradictory.)