CHAPTER IX I am not getting on at all; it is days since Delia was here and I wrote about her. There is certainly this advantage in the walls of a house, they make a fold for your mind, which must browse inside, picking up what it can. But existence in a garden was not meant to be interfered with by a pen; we have the best reason for believing that Adam never wrote for publication, much less Eve, who of course, when one thinks of it, was absorbed at that time in the first principles of dress-making. I envy her that original seam; sewing is an ideal occupation in a garden. You can be for ever looking up and the hand goes on of itself; everything rhymes with your needle, and your mind seems stimulated by its perfunctory superintendence to spin and weave other things, often lovely and interesting things which it is a pain to have forgotten by dinner-time. I should very much prefer fine stitching to composition out here if I could choose. One might then look at the sun on the leaves without the itch and necessity to explain just what it is like. Moreover, there is always this worry: you cannot make a whole chapter out of the sun on the leaves, even at different angles, and yet before that happy circumstance what else is there to say? But how little use there is in crying for what one was not meant to have. The fairy godmother who put this unwilling instrument into my hand and denied me a needle will have something to answer for if ever I meet her. Meanwhile I might as well confess that my finest stitching only makes mirth for Thisbe, and “lay a violence,” as Stevenson advises, upon my will to other ends.