nt,
although twenty-four hours have passed since I impulsively asked the
price of my cottage, and found that I could have it, studio and all,
for a yearly rental of ten pounds. I have never been a tenant "on my
own" before, and the knowledge that I am not going back to the attic
bedroom and the hard "easy" chairs of the Chelsea lodging-house which
has been my home for the last three years fills me with a great joy. I
feel as if I should suffocate if I were to go back, but it is my soul
which would be smothered. Subconsciously I have been panting for
Windyridge for months, and my soul recognised the place and leaped to
the discovery instantaneously.

Yet how strange it all seems: how ridiculously fantastic! I cannot get
away from that thought, and I am constantly asking myself whether
Providence or Fate, or any other power with a capital letter at the
beginning, is directing the move for my good, or whether it is just
whimsicalness on my part, self-originated and self-explanatory--the
explanation being that I am mad, as I said before.

When I look back on the events of the last three days and realise that
I have crossed my Rubicon and burned my boats behind me, and that I had
no conscious intention of doing anything of the kind when I set out, I
just gasp. If I had stayed to reason with myself I should never have
had the courage to pack a few things into a bag and take a third-class
ticket for Airlee at King's Cross, with the avowed intention of hearing
a Yorkshire choir sing in a summer festival. Yet it seems almost
prophetic as I recall the incident that I declined to take a return
ticket, though, to be sure, there was no advantage in doing so: no
reduction, I mean. Whether there was an advantage remains to be seen;
I verily believe I should have returned rather than have wasted that
return half. I dislike waste.

That was on Tuesday; on Wednesday I went to the Town Hall and entered a
new world. It cost me a good deal in coin of the realm--much more than
I had dreamed of--but I got it all back in the currency of heaven
before I came away. It may have been my excitable temperament--for my
mother, I remember, used to condone my faults by explaining that I was
"highly-strung," whatever that may mean--or it may have been the
Yorkshire blood in my veins which turned to fever heat as the vast
volume of sweet sound rose and fell; one thing is certain, I lost
myself completely, and did not find myself again until