Dinner time arrives, and as a rule I have done nothing.  Now comes the problem which faces me twice every day—­how to suffice in my own person for two children, put on their bibs, turn up their sleeves, and get them to eat.  In the midst of these ever-recurring cares, joys, and catastrophes, the only person neglected in the house is myself.  If the children have been naughty, often I don’t get rid of my curl-papers all day.  Their tempers rule my toilet.  As the price of a few minutes in which I write you these half-dozen pages, I have had to let them cut pictures out of my novels, build castles with books, chessmen, or mother-of-pearl counters, and give Nais my silks and wools to arrange in her own fashion, which, I assure you, is so complicated, that she is entirely absorbed in it, and has not uttered a word.

Yet I have nothing to complain of.  My children are both strong and independent; they amuse themselves more easily then you would think.  They find delight in everything; a guarded liberty is worth many toys.  A few pebbles—­pink, yellow, purple, and black, small shells, the mysteries of sand, are a world of pleasure to them.  Their wealth consists in possessing a multitude of small things.  I watch Armand and find him talking to the flowers, the flies, the chickens, and imitating them.  He is on friendly terms with insects, and never wearies of admiring them.  Everything which is on a minute scale interests them.  Armand is beginning to ask the “why” of everything he sees.  He has come to ask what I am saying to his godmother, whom he looks on as a fairy.  Strange how children hit the mark!

Alas! my sweet, I would not sadden you with the tale of my joys.  Let me give you some notion of your godson’s character.  The other day we were followed by a poor man begging—­beggars soon find out that a mother with her child at her side can’t resist them.  Armand has no idea what hunger is, and money is a sealed book to him; but I have just bought him a trumpet which had long been the object of his desires.  He held it out to the old man with a kingly air, saying: 

“Here, take this!”

What joy the world can give would compare with such a moment?

“May I keep it?” said the poor man to me.  “I too, madame, have had children,” he added, hardly noticing the money I put into his hand.

I shudder when I think that Armand must go to school, and that I have only three years and a half more to keep him by me.  The flowers that blossom in his sunny childhood will fall before the scythe of a public school system; his gracious ways and bewitching candor will lose their spontaneity.  They will cut the curls that I have brushed and smoothed and kissed so often!  What will they do with the thinking being that is Armand?

And what of you?  You tell me nothing of your life.  Are you still in love with Felipe?  For, as regards the Saracen, I have no uneasiness.  Good-bye; Nais has just had a tumble, and if I run on like this, my letter will become a volume.