Just after breakfast my friend from Voulangis drove over in a great state of excitement, with the proposition that I should pack up and return with her.  She seemed alarmed at the idea of my being alone, and seemed to think a group of us was safer.  It was a point of view that had not occurred to me, and I was not able to catch it.  Still, I was touched at her thoughtfulness, even though I had to say that I proposed to stay right here.  When she asked me what I proposed to do if the army came retreating across my garden, I instinctively laughed.  It seems so impossible this time that the Germans can pass the frontier, and get by Verdun and Toul.  All the same, that other people were thinking it possible rather brought me up standing.  I just looked at the little house I had arranged such a little time ago—­I have only been here two months.

She had come over feeling pretty glum—­my dear neighbor from Voulangis.  She went away laughing.  At the gate she said, “It looks less gloomy to me than it did when I came.  I felt such a brave thing driving over here through a country preparing for war.  I expected you to put a statue up in your garden ‘To a Brave Lady.’”

I stood in the road watching her drive away, and as I turned back to the house it suddenly took on a very human sort of look.  There passed through my mind a sudden realization, that, according to my habit, I had once again stuck my feet in the ground of a new home—­and taken root.  It is a fact.  I have often looked at people who seem to keep foot-free.  I never can.  If I get pulled up violently by the roots, if I have my earthly possessions pruned away, I always hurry as fast as I can, take root in a new place, and proceed to sprout a new crop of possessions which fix me there.  I used, when I was younger, to envy people who could just pack a bag and move on.  I am afraid that I never envied them enough to do as they did.  If I had I should have done it.  I find that life is pretty logical.  It is like chemical action—­given certain elements to begin with, contact with the fluids of Life give a certain result.  After all I fancy every one does about the best he can with the gifts he has to do with.  So I imagine we do what is natural to us; if we have the gift of knowing what we want and wanting it hard enough we get it.  If we don’t, we compromise.

I am closing this up rather hurriedly as one of the boys who joins his regiment at Fontainebleau will mail it in Paris as he passes through.  I suppose you are glad that you got away before this came to pass.

VIII

August 10,1914.

I have your cable asking me to come “home” as you call it.  Alas, my home is where my books are—­they are here.  Thanks all the same.

It is a week since I wrote you—­and what a week.  We have had a sort of intermittent communication with the outside world since the 6th, when, after a week of deprivation, we began to get letters and an occasional newspaper, brought over from Meaux by a boy on a bicycle.