ttle "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
and take out the keys. Then I come into the salon and lock the door
after me, and push two of the biggest bolts you ever saw.

After which I hang up the keys, which are as big as the historic key of
the Bastille, which you may remember to have seen at the Musee
Carnavalet. Then I close and bolt all the shutters downstairs. I do it
systematically every night--because I promised not to be foolhardy. I
always grin, and feel as if it were a scene in a play. It impresses me
so much like a tremendous piece of business--dramatic suspense--which
leads up to nothing except my going quietly upstairs to bed.

When it is all done I feel as I used to in my strenuous working days,
when, after midnight, all the rest of the world--my little world--being
calmly asleep, I cuddled down in the corner of my couch to read;--the
world is m