We motored through the wet sunshiny country, softly dipped and softly lifted, blue-green forest and wide ripe harvest fields, blue and purple and crimson beet fields, long low brown and rust-red towns with square church towers, Sunday people out in the doorways, and swallows always flying low and crying. We had tea in Soissons, at Maurizi's, and went to the cathedral, where the offices were over, and to the pastrycook's, Monsieur Pigot's, to buy some cherry tarts. Home by the long straight road between the poplars. It was so cold suddenly that one imagined autumn. There was a wind come up, and some yellow leaves were flying with it. After dinner we had a fire lighted in the tiled room. The heat brought out all the sweetness of the roses in the blue bowls, and the flames sent lovely lights and shadows to play along the old stone walls. I do not think I would be afraid if it were not for my dreams. Every night I have dreamed of galloping horses and thunder--or cannon, I don't know which--and of blood, dripping and dripping down the château stairs. I see the blood in red pools on the worn old grey stones of the stairs, and in black stains on the new carpet. Some of the nights I have stayed up, walking the floor of my room that I might not sleep and dream so horribly. Monday, July 27th The papers make things look better; we think it cannot be, cannot possibly be. But I am always afraid, because of my dreams. My dreams have been very bad all night. I was in the potager most of the morning, working hard. In the afternoon some neighbors came to tea. They came from quite far, motoring across the forests, and none of them had known the house. I loved showing them the old place that is not mine, the colours that are faded and worn till they have become beautiful, the things that by much belonging together are fallen into harmony. I do not believe that the people of these old houses can love them quite as hopelessly as strangers do. There is a certain special peculiar château smell, that trails down long galleries, and lingers on the stairs, that lurks in far corners of the rooms, and abides in all the cupboards, and behind the tapestries, and in the big carved chests, that clings to wood and waxed floors and stone, and stirs along the heavy sombre walls, and that means France, like the smell of old gardens of box and yew. It stabs one--always the arrowy perfume--and makes one feel France with an odd intensity. From a far way off one would be homesick remembering it. We had Monsieur Pigot's tarts for tea, and sat for a long time about the dining-room table, talking of how afraid we had been of war, yesterday. We went up into the Dungeon Tower and down into the souterrains, and then all along the rampart walls. I love the way the little town crowds up close to the ramparts, the cobbled grass-grown streets, the roofs all softened and coloured by ages and weathers.