A delightful article by the well-known English writer Daphne du Maurier, which we came upon in the magazine "Vogue" and chose to reproduce for the pleasure and profit it contains.

A short while ago I was on a brief visit to London. There I met a lady I had not seen for years. We began talking of various things, such as family and friends. And as we were about to part, the lady asked me: "Tell me — when you are not busy writing, how do you spend your time in Cornwall? Do you know many people in that village?"

I answered her: "I keep to my house, I rarely go anywhere, and I know no one."

She said: "So you pride yourself on being the mistress of a house, and a slave to your children."

I answered: "Not at all! The house looks after itself, and so do my children!"

She looked at me in wonder and astonishment and cried: "Then what do you do?"

And so we parted, she doubting what I had told her. The truth is, I do nothing, and I am delighted by it, and I hope to go on doing nothing to the end of my life. But delight in idleness is not a blessing granted to just anyone, for whoever can take delight in idleness must be endowed with dullness — the dullness that breeds in the soul a distaste for pleasure and unbridled gaiety. And few are they who confess to their dullness; dullness, after all, is a deadly sin — and one I am proud of. But let us come down to fact: the day is, ordinarily, twelve hours. How does one spend them if one does, in fact, nothing?

Suppose it is one of the hot days of summer. The sky is blue, and the sun crowns the treetops in the garden. I rise at nine o'clock, rub my eyes, stretch out my arms, look at the hours of the day before me, and remember that I have no appointment with anyone — nor, indeed, with anything. Were it not for the half hour I spend every two weeks at the dentist's, the calendar before my eyes would be white as snow. Then I take my breakfast, and the children come to wish me good morning and say good-bye before

pouring themselves into their lessons. It delights me to know that my youngest child is now five years old, and yet, young as he is, enjoys individuality and independence! I like, over breakfast, to think, and to sink deep in thought. Nothing cuts the current of my thinking but the summons to the bath. I answer the summons, then put on my clothes, and sit down at my desk to pen an article for The Times — never published — on the subject of "birth control." The birth rate is falling, and I know the reason; so does every mother of our present generation. The reason is not social anxiety, nor fear of the atomic bomb, nor the moving pictures. The reason, in truth, is that we do not want to bear many children. And had the woman of the past found effective means of preventing conception, she would have done the same.

Here the post arrives, and in it I find a check from France. This check holds a quantity of francs enough to keep an entire family for six months. And the Ministry of Finance will not allow me to send a single piaster to a friend of mine in France. I have no need of money here, but that friend is in urgent need of a little of it — and yet I cannot help her. What is this world economic order whose secrets I have never managed to understand??

Then I set about making my bed and putting the room in order. Hardly have I finished when I take up my basket and my shears and go to the garden. I cut a few flowers for my study, as rich ladies used to do a hundred years ago — though they wore gloves and broad hats, unlike me. And so I spend some twenty minutes gazing at the lovely blossoms and roses and cutting whichever please me. My thoughts wander off to the question of which of the two is the more appealing: the modern woman who sits alongside men on committees, or the woman of the bygone Victorian age, whose world was as her husband defined it, and whose one pleasure was found in gatherings and drawing rooms?

I have finished setting the flowers in the vase, and it remains for me to cut some dry branches for the