There may be a more smiling hill-top than “La Collina Ridente” somewhere on the Southern California edge of the Pacific Ocean, but deep down in my heart I don’t believe that there is.  It is just the right size hill-top—­except when I first began to drive the motor, and then it seemed a trifle small for turning around.  It’s just high enough above the coast highway and the town to give us seclusion, and it’s just far enough from the waves to be peaceful.  It used to be called “Suma Paz”—­perfect peace—­but we changed the name, that being so unpleasantly suggestive of angels, and, anyway, there isn’t such a thing.  If “The Smiling Hill-Top” were everything it seems on a blue and green day like to-day, for instance, it would be a menace to my character.  I should never leave, I should exist beautifully, leading the life of a cauliflower or bit of seaweed floating in one of the pools in the rocks, or to be even more tropically poetic, a lovely lotus flower!  I should not bother about the children’s education or grieve over J——­’s bachelor state of undarned socks and promiscuous meals, or the various responsibilities I left behind in town, so it is fortunate that there are thorns.  Every garden, from Eden down, has produced them.

I haven’t catalogued mine, I have just put them down “higgledy-piggledy,” as we used to say when we were children.  J——­’s having to work in town, too far to come home except for an occasional week-end, the neighbors’ dogs, servants, Bermuda grass, tenants, ants, the eccentricities of an adobe road during the rains, and the lapses of the delivery system of the village.  Of course they are of varying degrees of unpleasantness.  J——­’s absence is horrid but the common lot, so I have accepted it and am learning “to possess, in loneliness, the joy of all the earth.”  Truth compels me to add that it isn’t always loneliness, either, as, for example, one week-end that was much cheered by a visit from our architect friend, who rode down from Santa Barbara in his motor, and made himself very popular with every member of the household.  He brought home the laundry, bearded the ice man in his lair, making ice-cream possible for Sunday dinner, mended the garden lattice, and drew entrancing pictures of galleons sailing in from fairy shores with all their canvas spread, for the boys.  As we waved our handkerchiefs to him from the Good-by Gate on Monday, Joedy turned to me: 

“I wish he didn’t have to go!” A little pause.

“Muvs, if you weren’t married to Father, how would you like—­” but here I interrupted by calling his attention to a rabbit in the canyon.