personal contacts, associations, and activities? Or are we meant to
act on impulse alone? It is all a darkness.

II

I DON'T know how it is best to put this thing down--whether it
would be better to try and tell the story from the beginning, as if it
were a story; or whether to tell it from this distance of time, as it
reached me from the lips of Leonora or from those of Edward
himself.

So I shall just imagine myself for a fortnight or so at one side of
the fireplace of a country cottage, with a sympathetic soul
opposite me. And I shall go on talking, in a low voice while the
sea sounds in the distance and overhead the great black flood of
wind polishes the bright stars. From time to time we shall get up
and go to the door and look out at the great moon and say: "Why,
it is nearly as bright as in Provence!" And then we shall come
back to the fireside, with just the touch of a sigh because we are
not in that Provence where even the saddest stories are gay.
Consider the lamentable history of Peire Vidal. Two years ago
Florence and I motored from Biarritz to Las Tours, which is in the
Black Mountains. In the middle of a tortuous valley there rises up
an immense pinnacle and on the pinnacle are four castles--Las
Tours, the Towers. And the immense mistral blew down that
valley which was the way from France into Provence so that the
silver grey olive leaves appeared like hair flying in the wind, and
the tufts of rosemary crept into the iron rocks that they might not
be torn up by the roots.