Indeed you shall know, to the smallest detail, just how the material
side of my life is arranged,--all my comforts and discomforts,--since
you ask.

I am now absolutely settled into my little "hole" in the country, as you
call it. It has been so easy. I have been here now nearly three weeks.
Everything is in perfect order. You would be amazed if you could see
just how everything fell into place. The furniture has behaved itself
beautifully. There are days when I wonder if either I or it ever lived
anywhere else. The shabby old furniture with which you were long so
familiar just slipped right into place. I had not a stick too little,
and could not have placed another piece. I call that "bull luck."

I have always told you--you have not always agreed--that France was the
easiest place in the world to live in, and the love of a land in which
to be a pauper. That is why it suits me.

Don't harp on that word "alone." I know I am living alone, in a house
that has four outside doors into the bargain. But you know I am not one
of the "afraid" kind. I am not boasting. That is a characteristic, not
a quality. One is afraid or one is not. It happens that I am not.
Still, I am Very prudent. You would laugh if you could see me "shutting
up" for the night. All my windows on the ground floor are heavily
barred. Such of the doors as have glass in them have shutters also.
The window shutters are primitive affairs of solid wood, with
diamond-shaped holes in the upper part. First, I put up the shutters on
the door in the dining-room which leads into the garden on the south
side; then I lock the door. Then I do a similar service for the kitchen
door on to the front terrace, and that into the orchard, and lock both
doors. Then I go out the salon door and lock the stable and the grange