“Come out! I know you’re there,” I cry in several corners. No Little Thing.
Then I must confess I begin to feel just a wee bit anxious; when cautiously I hear another key scroop in the lock. It is Anastasia, and she has evidently been walking briskly for her eyes are radiant, and a roseleaf colour flutters in her cheeks. I watch her steal in just as I have done, holding behind her a largish parcel.
“Hullo! What have you got there?”
She jumps, then tries to conceal the package. Seeing that it is useless she turns on me imperiously.
“Go away one moment! Oh go, please!”
“Tell me what’s in your parcel, then.”
“It’s nossing. It’s not your affair. Please give it to me. Now you are not nice. Oh thanks! Now you are nice. To-morrow I show you what it is.”
So I leave off teasing her and make no further reference to the mysterious packet.
There is no doubt the Christmas spirit is getting into me, for I find it more and more difficult to keep my mind on my work. This is distressing, because lately I have been making but slow progress. Often I find myself halting ten minutes or more to empale some elusive word. Greatly am I concerned over rhythm and structure. Of ideas I have no lack; it is form, form that holds me in travail. And the more I perspire over my periods the more self-exacting I seem to become. There will arrive a time, I fear, when my ideal of expression will be so high I will not be able to express myself at all. I wonder if it is something in the air of this Paris that calls to all that is fine and high in the soul?
After supper Anastasia remarks in some surprise: “Why! you do not smoke zis hevening?”