When I go to see him he is always cheerful, looks so clean for a change, shaved and dressed in a hospital nightshirt. It is something to know that he gets warm meals and is cared for. The nurses are very kind. He is not a complainer, that’s sure. Takes a huge interest in his fellow-patients, who come and go, plays cards with anyone who is well enough to join in a game. We have Flicker now. He’s a dear dog and Cornelius already loves him. So at least Old Pete knows his friend is in safe hands, always asks about Flicker, and bemoans the fact that we can’t hunt him. “He’s a good dog,” he told me last time. “Tell Ed to take him along when he’s hunting hedgehogs. Flicker will turn them over with his nose. Tell Ed.” But poor Ed is so badgered by people complaining that he hasn’t plowed them out, and so busy trying to keep the machinery going (we need a new plow badly, he says) that he hardly gets a night’s sleep. We had three new snows in succession two weeks ago, after Jane’s funeral, and that was bad enough, but then the sleet followed. Where will all the snow go when it melts? I sometimes wonder whether I shall ever see a patch of earth again.

So we are deep in winter, and deep in Willard. Except for my knee, which acts rather like a toothache when the weather is damp, I feel wonderfully well. Ellen teases me, says I look ten years younger for all the hard work, and blames it on Eben. “You have a light in your eye,” she says in her dry, mocking voice. But it’s not Eben. It is that I feel brimful of life—real life. By that I mean waking up to the mountain, waking up to Cornelius and a whole day together alone, doing things that really matter. I suppose it is a kind of escape. If so, we shan’t have it forever. Marianne has written me a long letter about Cathy. She is doing badly at school and seems to be on the verge of a sort of breakdown. They feel it might be good for her to come next month, go to the town high school, if we can get her in, and, as Marianne says, help me out with the cooking and housework. Olivia is back of this, I think, for she also wrote me. Oh dear, the awful truth is that neither Cornelius nor I really want the darling thing. Yet, we can’t possibly refuse. John, bless his heart, says not to think of it. “You’re old enough to do what you want to do, Mother,” he said on the phone last night. “Cathy is not your responsibility. You have enough on your hands.”