k, and I
continued to think for a long time, that I could not live if my feet did
not press a city pavement. The fact that I have changed my mind seems
to me, at my age, a sufficient excuse for, as frankly, changing my
habits. It surely proves that I have not a sick will--yet. In the
simple life I crave--digging in the earth, living out of doors--I expect
to earn the strength of which city life and city habits were robbing me.
I believe I can. Faith half wins a battle. No one ever dies up on this
hill, I am told, except of hard drink. Judging by my experience with
workmen here, not always of that. I never saw so many very old, very
active, robust people in so small a space in all my life as I have seen
here.

Are you answered?

Yet if, after all this expenditure of words, you still think I am
shirking--well, I am sorry. It seems to me that, from another point of
view, I am doing my duty, and giving the younger generation more room--
getting out of the lime-light, so to speak, which, between you and me,
was getting trying for my mental complexion. If I have blundered, the
consequences be on my own head. My hair could hardly be whiter--that's
something. Besides, retreat is not cut off. I have sworn no eternal
oath not to change my mind again.

In any case you have no occasion to worry about me: I've a head full of
memories. I am going to classify them, as I do my books. Some of them I
am going to forget, just as I reject books that have ceased to interest
me. I know the latter is always a wrench. The former may be
impossible. I shall not be lonely. No one who reads is ever that. I
may miss talking. Perhaps that is a good thing. I may have talked too
much. That does happen.

Remember one thing--I am not inaccessible. I may now and then get an
opportunity to talk again, and in a new background. Who knows? I am
counting on nothing but the facts about me. So come on, Future. I've
my back against the past. Anyway, as you see, it is too late to argue.
I've crossed the Rubicon, and can return only when I have built a new
bridge.

II

June 18, 1914.

That's right. Accept the situation. You will soon find that Paris will
seem the same to you. Besides, I had really given all I had to give
there.

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 li