_December 21._

I have at last made up my mind. I'm going to take on this job. How
unwillingly I can hardly tell you. I wanted to be in the great Push
next year so badly. Everyone, everything, is preparing for it. The
cavalry will get through, and I shall be driving about behind in some
gilded car, or watching from some very distant hill with Jezebel (who
won't care a damn whether the cavalry get through or not).

But I had two interviews with the Major and the General to-day. Coves
like painters seem to be rather wanted, and--well, it's clear now. I
must go.

To-morrow or next week, perhaps, the extreme fascination of the job will
obliterate a certain feeling of flatness, of disappointment, of ... of
... of shirking. Yes, that's it: I feel as if I were shirking all the
horrors. You see, I shall enjoy this job immensely. All the hateful
"arrangering things" for large numbers of men, all the tiresome
formalities, all the discomfort, all the future dangers, finished
with--over. I don't say that we've had _long_ periods of danger or
_much_ discomfort; but we've had quite enough to make a very ordinary
mortal hope never to go through it again.

But to think that I've deliberately chosen the easy path. Well, I don't
care! I've chosen it. I meant to choose it. I'm glad I've chosen it.
That is the one job in the whole war that I could do really well. How
best to serve the country--that's the only question. So there you are.
I've been and took the plunge, and I believe I'm right.

First of all a week or two getting to know the ropes in _this_ corps,
and then off with the Major and the General to another corps.

My aunt! what an egoistical letter this is. However, to you no
apologies.

_December 22._

[Sidenote: A DECISION]

Letters have been lurching in, in threes and fours. But what matters it
how they come? I always know that they are coming. And the future's
where _my_ heart is always. So here's to the letters to come, and here's
to our meeting again, and here's to Life--long, sweet, glorious Life.

We shall see the Christmas roses of the Cotswolds together one day, and
I think the war will have given them a mysterious loveliness that we
never understood before. Every year they'll come up out of the ground
again and surprise us. I shall be getting older and older--and so will
you, too. And all our little plans will have a quiet, peaceful joy for
us that wouldn't have been possible but for the war. Art will