In any case you have no occasion to worry about me:  I’ve a head full of memories.  I am going to classify them, as I do my books.  Some of them I am going to forget, just as I reject books that have ceased to interest me.  I know the latter is always a wrench.  The former may be impossible.  I shall not be lonely.  No one who reads is ever that.  I may miss talking.  Perhaps that is a good thing.  I may have talked too much.  That does happen.

Remember one thing—­I am not inaccessible.  I may now and then get an opportunity to talk again, and in a new background.  Who knows?  I am counting on nothing but the facts about me.  So come on, Future.  I’ve my back against the past.  Anyway, as you see, it is too late to argue.  I’ve crossed the Rubicon, and can return only when I have built a new bridge.

II

June 18, 1914.

That’s right.  Accept the situation.  You will soon find that Paris will seem the same to you.  Besides, I had really given all I had to give there.

Indeed you shall know, to the smallest detail, just how the material side of my life is arranged,—­all my comforts and discomforts,—­since you ask.

I am now absolutely settled into my little “hole” in the country, as you call it.  It has been so easy.  I have been here now nearly three weeks.  Everything is in perfect order.  You would be amazed if you could see just how everything fell into place.  The furniture has behaved itself beautifully.  There are days when I wonder if either I or it ever lived anywhere else.  The shabby old furniture with which you were long so familiar just slipped right into place.  I had not a stick too little, and could not have placed another piece.  I call that “bull luck.”

I have always told you—­you have not always agreed—­that France was the easiest place in the world to live in, and the love of a land in which to be a pauper.  That is why it suits me.

Don’t harp on that word “alone.”  I know I am living alone, in a house that has four outside doors into the bargain.  But you know I am not one of the “afraid” kind.  I am not boasting.  That is a characteristic, not a quality.  One is afraid or one is not.  It happens that I am not.  Still, I am Very prudent.  You would laugh if you could see me “shutting up” for the night.  All my windows on the ground floor are heavily barred.  Such of the doors as have glass in them have shutters also.  The window shutters are primitive affairs of solid wood, with diamond-shaped holes in the upper part.  First, I put up the shutters on the door in the dining-room which leads into the garden on the south side; then I lock the door.  Then I do a similar service for the kitchen door on to the front terrace, and that into the orchard, and lock both doors.  Then I go out the salon door and lock the stable and the grange and take out the keys.  Then I come into the salon and lock the door after me, and push two of the biggest bolts you ever saw.