But I have come to feel the need of calm and quiet—­perfect peace.  I know again that there is a sort of arrogance in expecting it, but I am going to make a bold bid for it.  I will agree, if you like, that it is cowardly to say that my work is done.  I will even agree that we both know plenty of women who have cheerfully gone on struggling to a far greater age, and I do think it downright pretty of you to find me younger than my years.  Yet you must forgive me if I say that none of us know one another, and, likewise, that appearances are often deceptive.

What you are pleased to call my “pride” has helped me a little.  No one can decide for another the proper moment for striking one’s colors.

I am sure that you—­or for that matter any other American—­never heard of Huiry.  Yet it is a little hamlet less than thirty miles from Paris.  It is in that district between Paris and Meaux little known to the ordinary traveler.  It only consists of less than a dozen rude farm-houses, less than five miles, as a bird flies, from Meaux, which, with a fair cathedral, and a beautiful chestnut-shaded promenade on the banks of the Marne, spanned just there bylines of old mills whose water-wheels churn the river into foaming eddies, has never been popular with excursionists.  There are people who go there to see where Bossuet wrote his funeral orations, in a little summer-house standing among pines and cedars on the wall of the garden of the Archbishop’s palace, now, since the “separation,” the property of the State, and soon to be a town museum.  It is not a very attractive town.  It has not even an out-of-doors restaurant to tempt the passing automobilist.

My house was, when I leased it, little more than a peasant’s hut.  It is considerably over one hundred and fifty years old, with stables and outbuildings attached whimsically, and boasts six gables.  Is it not a pity, for early association’s sake, that it has not one more?

I have, as Traddles used to say, “Oceans of room, Copperfield,” and no joking.  I have on the ground floor of the main building a fair sized salon, into which the front door opens directly.  Over that I have a long, narrow bed-room and dressing-room, and above that, in the eaves, a sort of attic work-shop.  In an attached, one-story addition with a gable, at the west of the salon, I have a library lighted from both east and west.  Behind the salon on the west side I have a double room which serves as dining and breakfast-room, with a guest-chamber above.  The kitchen, at the north side of the salon, has its own gable, and there is an old stable extending forward at the north side, and an old grange extending west from the dining-room.  It is a jumble of roofs and chimneys, and looks very much like the houses I used to combine from my Noah’s Ark box in the days of my babyhood.

All the rooms on the ground floor are paved in red tiles, and the staircase is built right in the salon.  The ceilings are raftered.  The cross-beam in the salon fills my soul with joy—­it is over a foot wide and a foot and a half thick.  The walls and the rafters are painted green,—­my color,—­and so good, by long trial, for my eyes and my nerves, and my disposition.