hearth. I say to myself: "Truly, our problem with the mines is the very same as our problem with the birth rate: women do not care to bear children, and men do not care to work in the mines, though all the temptations of the world conspire upon them."

Work in the mines is hard and grueling, and its wage is small. That is why our young men prefer positions in offices, or buying and selling in the shops. Who then, one wonders, is to do the manual work

the world needs? And I have observed, in cut-ting my firewood, that manual work is good for every human being — but ... in small measure.

And so I feel a slight ache in my back as I creep toward the lunch table. Roast veal once again, and boiled potatoes too. And it is irony indeed that in the middle of lunch I should receive a cable from America telling me that the last copy of the million printed of my latest book has come off the press — whereupon I look at my dress and find it a leftover from before the war, riddled with the holes the moths have made in it. I have twelve coupons left in my clothing ration

book, enough for just two dresses or a single jacket. I think of the beautiful clothes I could buy on Fifth Avenue in New York, and I remember that not one cent may be spent across the Atlantic before it is brought over to England, where it turns into "pounds" and has such taxes levied upon it as leave of it a

few "shillings." And that, upon my life, is exactly the thing to spur a person on to greater effort.

The slice of roast meat has been concluded with a cup of coffee. But the sun is still shining. Here I am, sinking into my beloved chair that faces the sea. And who could hope to wish for more than this? I have no desire to look farther than the headland that runs some ten miles out into the sea. Does travel broaden a person's mind? That is what puzzles me. And is

there anything more wearisome than that land-bound Sindbad who says: "I remember when I was in Baghdad in 1921"? What, I wonder, was I doing in that year? I was fourteen years old, and lovesick over the actor Basil Rathbone, who came one day to Hampstead to play tennis with my father.

Do you change every seven years? Or is that an illu-sion? I believe it is the truth. I glimpse the phantoms of the past dancing before my eyes in the sunbeams: the bashful child, the restless adolescent, the mocking, scoff-ing young woman, the bride eager to please, and, at last, the bewildered mother. And now? Ah — the middle

years of a person's life have an air all their own. Gone is that

question, "What does the future hold for me?" — gone every other question about the secrets of life. "Wait until you are forty," my father once said to me; "you will not find it easy then."

My daughters are playing in the garden now,