There, déjeuner is ready, and you'll be glad, maybe, dear, faraway Dad, because it will spare you further descriptions. After déjeuner we shall proceed to be lightning-conducted again, and I shall duly collect a few more adventures to recount. Good-bye, dear. How I wish you were with me instead of Aunt Mary!
Your everlasting
Molly.
JACK WINSTON TO LORD LANE
Biarritz, December 11.
My dear Montie,
I have let you rest a good long time without a letter (not that I've been taking a rest myself), and now I should think you are opening your eyes with astonishment at the picture on my paper of a hotel at beautiful, blowy Biarritz. Thereby hangs a tale of adventure and misadventure.
No doubt my fair employer believes me at this moment to be consorting with couriers in the servants hall (if there be one) of her hotel. But, as usual, I know a trick worth two of that; and having washed his hands of Brown for the time being, your friend Jack sits smoking his pipe and writing to you in what is known as the "monkey-house" of this hotel. As you don't know Biarritz, you'll think that in exchanging all the comforts of a servants' hall for a monkey-house I am not doing myself as well as I might. But there are monkey-houses and monkey-houses. This one is a delightful glass room built on to the front of the hotel, facing a garden and tennis courts, commanding a glorious view of the sea and also of every creature, human and inhuman, who goes by. One has tea in the monkey-house; one writes letters, reads novels, smokes or gossips, according to sex and inclination; one can also be seen at one's private avocations by the madding crowd outside the glass house, hence the name.
The air is luminous with sunshine and pungent with ozone. Great green rollers are marching in, to break in thunder on the beach, and fling rainbow spouts of spray over tumbled brown rocks. In the distance the sea has all the colours of a peacock's tail; the world is at its best, and I ought to be rejoicing in its hospitality; but I'm not. The fact is, I'm upset in my mind. I'm over head and ears in love, and as there's no hope of scrambling out again (I'm hanged if I would, even if I could) or of getting my feet on solid ground, mere beauty of landscape and seascape appear slightly irrelevant.