27 December 1920
27 December 1920
27 December 1920
Villa Isola Bella, Menton, France
My dear Virginia
Please don't talk of a triumph, even in jest. It makes me hang my head. I wish some day I might deserve your long generous letter - but the day is far off, I realise that. Thank you for it all the same. It came on Xmas day too, and so was a two-fold gift.
I think of you often - very often. I long to talk to you. Here, at last then is time to talk. If Virginia were to come through the gate & were to say "Well - Katherine" - oh, there are a thousand things Id like to discuss.
I wonder if you know what your visits were to me - or how much I miss them. You are the only woman with whom I long to talk work. There will never be another.
But leagues divide us. I have taken this little house until the end of 1922. Perhaps you will come here before then. It is in the country & there is a garden & a stone terrace. It is solitary but not lonely. One lives by the sky again - by the changes of cloud & light. Whenever I think of Asheham it is of clouds - big golden clouds, hazy, spinning slowly over the downs -
Oh, how beautiful Life is, Virginia, it is marvellously beautiful. Were one to live for ever it would not be long enough. Sometimes I sit on the wall watching the sun & the wind shake over the long grass & the wild orchid cups & I feel - - - simply helpless before this wonder.
Farewell dear friend. (May I call you that).
Yours ever
Katherine
[Letter to Virginia Woolf in Collected Letters]