The above is rather stern and brusque, isn’t it? Well I wrote it in rather stirring times--now only memories. I am resting now, in a beautiful place--on a high hilltop covered with pine and fir trees. I never saw any mountain-place in America I thought better to look at or from. I sleep on a couch made soft with deftly laid young spruce boughs and eat at a table set under good, kind trees. A great improvement on living in a dug-out and even (to my mind) an improvement on a room with a bed in a village. I am not on a furlough, I am working, but my work is of a light and interesting kind and fills only six out of twenty-four hours. So I have plenty of time for writing, and have started a prose-sketch (based on an exciting and colourful experience of the last month) which I will send you soon. _Everything_ I write, I think, in prose or verse, should be submitted to Doran first. I wish I could tell you more about my work, but at present I cannot. But there are advertised in the American magazines many books about the Intelligence Service--get one of them and you’ll find why I like my job. The work Douglas is doing is not allied to mine. Only I suppose he’ll have a commission. I won’t work for one, because I don’t want to leave this outfit. I love you more than ever, and long for the pictures you promise me. You will be amused by the postcards I enclose. JOYCE. Say, the stuff about your not appreciating “Rouge Bouquet” was written before I got your delightful letter of April 18, admirable critic! * * * * * Dear Aline: I have just received your letters of April 1st and April 5th. “Moonlight” is noble, like its author. As to being worried about you because it expresses pain, why, I’d be worried only if you did not sometimes feel and express pain. Spiritual pain (sometimes physical pain) is beautiful and wholesome and in our soul we love it, whatever our lips say. Do you not, in turn, worry because of my foolish letter to you from the hospital. At that time I was just an office hack--now I am a soldier, in the most fascinating branch of the service there is--you’d love it! It is sheer romance, night and day--especially night! And I am now therefore saner than when I wrote to you from the hospital. I’ve had only a week of this work--but I’m already a much nicer person. “For Sergeant Joyce is three, and Oh, He knows so much he did not know!”