20 Dec 1921

20 December 1921

Chalet des Sapins, Montana-sur-Sierre, Switzerland

   But all the same I shall never get over my first hatred of the Swiss. They are the same everywhere. Ugly, dull, solid lumps, with a passion divided between pigs and foreigners. Foreigners are what they prefer to gorge themselves with but pigs will serve. As to their ankles - they fill me with a kind of anguish. I should have an ankle complex if I lived in Switzerland long. But one never lives anywhere long . . .
   I wonder if you are going to spend the winter in England? Everybody that one used to know seems to have disappeared. But I suppose they are really all there just as of yore. It is nice to know B. R. is so happy - with an infant Conrad, too! How amazing. I so looked forward to his Chinese sketches in the Nation, but I wish he told one more of the lakes and mountains. I could dispense with Mrs Dewey altogether if I knew the trees were shaped like umbrellas. I was thankful and fell greedily upon the little bonfires he did mention. But oh, when people have seen marvels, I wish they would tell of them!
   M. and I are reading Jane Austen in the evenings. With delight. ‘Emma' is really a perfect book - don't you feel? I enjoy every page. I cant have enough of Miss Bates or Mr Woodhouse's gruel or that charming Mr Knightley. Its such an exquisite comfort to escape from the modern novels I have been forcibly reading. Wretched affairs! I do ask for something that I can't hand on to my dog to be read by him with relish and much tail thumping. This fascinated pursuit of the sex adventure is beyond words boring! I am so bored by sex quâ sex, by the gay dog sniffing round the prostitutes bedroom or by the ultra modern snigger - worse still - that I could die - at least,

[To Ottoline Morell, c. 20 December 1921.]