ith
your one weak spot--so weak, so absurd that it can only be kissed, and
laughed at and adored.

"Paula, my own, the twenty-five years have never existed. There is only
one immortal moment--and that is to come.

"Beloved, best beloved, only beloved, I want you so badly.

"MAURICE.

"Besides, you have got to describe me several dresses for my new book."

XIII

AULD LANG SYNE

[_To HAROLD NICOLSON_]

It was delightful to be back in England after two and a half years. Two
and a half years of India, of pomp and circumstance and being envied, of
heat and homesickness and loneliness. How starved she had felt--starved
of little intellectual coteries with their huge intellectual
sensations--starved of new books and old pictures and music, of moss
roses and primroses and bluebell woods, starved even into the
selfishness of coming home, urged away by Robert, who did not know how
to be selfish. Thinking of him made her feel very tender and very small.
His iron public spirit, his inevitable devotion to duty, unconscious and
instinctive and uncensorious, combined with a guilty sense that her
youth and beauty had been uprooted by him, and put into a dusty distant
soil. He was more convinced than any one of the importance of books and
music and intellectual interests (he never read and did not know one
note from another) because they were important to her and had therefore
received a consecration they could never have had by merely being
important to him. It was all so very simple--What she admired was
beautiful; what she laughed at was funny; what she loved was divine--And
she belonged to him--Robert. It was a miracle that found him every night
on his knees in humble gratitude. She had, he thought, been so
wonderfully good, walking on his red baize carpets as if they were
fields of flowers, learning Sanscrit with passion and pretending, with
what seemed to him complete success, and to them, absolute failure, that
she liked Anglo-Indian women. When one by one his staff were
incapacitated by love, he never complained. It made them of course
useless, but how could they help falling in love with her? It would have
been so unnatural if they had not. And when she told him--and to do her
justice she knew that she was telling him the truth--that she was not
worthy to do up his shoe laces--he would laugh and kiss her hand and
send up a little internal prayer to God to be able to do something to
deserve his wife.

No won