d I have been meditating.
Back at Alabama Ranch, I suppose, there's twenty degrees of frost and
a northwest wind like a search-warrant. Here there's a pellucid blue
sky, just enough breeze to rustle the bamboo-fronds behind me, and a
tall girl in white lawn, holding a pale green parasol over her head
and meandering slowly along the sun-steeped boulevard, which smells of
hot tar.

I've been sitting here staring down that boulevard, with the strong
light making me squint a little. I've been watching the two rows of
date-palms along the curb, with their willow-plume head-dress stirring
lazily in the morning breeze. Well back from the smooth and shining
asphalt, as polished as ebony with its oil-drip and tire-wear, is a
row of houses, some shingled and awninged, some Colonial-Spanish, and
stuccoed and bone-white in the sun, some dark-wooded and vine-draped
and rose-grown, but all immaculate and finished and opulent. The
street is very quiet, but half-way down the block I can see a Jap
gardener in brown denim sedately watering a well-barbered terrace.
Still farther away, somebody, in one of the deep-shadowed porches, is
tinkling a ukelele, and somebody that I can't see is somewhere beating
a rug. I can see a little rivulet of water that flows sparkling down
the asphalted runnel of the curb. Then the clump of bamboos back by
Peter's bedroom window rustles crisply again and is quiet and the
silence is broken by a nurse-maid calling to a child sitting in a toy
motor-wagon. Then a touring-car purrs past, with the sun flashing on
its polished metal equipment, and the toy motor child being led
reluctantly homeward by the maid cries shrilly, and in the silence
that ensues I can hear the faint hiss of a spray-nozzle that builds a
transient small rainbow just beyond the trellis of Cherokee roses from
which a languid white petal falls, from time to time.

It's a _dolce-far-niente_ day, as all the days seem to be here, and
the best that I can do is sit and brood like a Plymouth Rock with a
full crop. But I've been thinking things over. And I've come to
several conclusions.

One is that I'm not so contented as I thought I was going to be. I am
oppressed by a shadowy feeling of in some way sailing under false
colors. I am also hounded by an equally shadowy impression that I'm a
convalescent. Yet I find myself vulgarly healthy, my kiddies have all
acquired a fine coat of tan, and only Struthers is slightly off her
feed, having acquire