Your letter and your book made a sort of Fête de Saint Sylvie of yesterday. Your lovely little letter brought you back to me so clearly—very radiant, in air blue and primrose, sitting for a moment in time on my small sofa—the one which in private life is known as “the stickleback.”

page 93

Thank you very much indeed, please, for The Swallow Dive. It is full of the most beautiful things. You turn to Beauty like a flower to the light. (I must put it in the third person. It's easier to say.) She fills and glows with it and is like a shining transparent cup of praise… Early morning light, I feel, with the grass still pearled and long, slender shadows… If you were here I should like to say… “Caroline crying after she had heard of Ethel's engagement”; “her moment of leaving her Aunt Mildred's house for ever…”; “her top of the 'bus ride”; her pink cotton frock drifting through July in London. As to the Fall of Antioch, I hear it, smell it, know it as if I had played in it. But above all, Ashleem! Your early morning description of Ashleem, miss, took away my breff.

Forgive an impudent woman. She's very, very serious really. And because we are fellow-workmen, may I say I think you sometimes know more than you say, and sometimes you say less than you know… Does that convey anything?

I find my great difficulty in writing is to learn to submit. Not that one ought to be without resistance—of course I don't mean that. But when I am writing of ‘another’ I want so to lose myself in the soul of the other that I am not…

I wish we could have a talk about writing one of these days.

Was there really a new baby in your letter? Oh dear, some people have all the babies in this world. And as sometimes happens to us women just before your letter came, I found myself tossing a little creature up in the air and saying, “Whose boy are you? But he was far too shadowy, too far away to reply.

So tell me about your baby, will you? And when I do get out of this old bed I shall drive to the lace shop and buy a cobweb to make a cap for himher. Farewell. May the fairies attend you. No, dear woman, it is grim work— having babies. Accept my love and my sympathy.