I must make another effort at once. I must begin all over again. I must try and write simply, fully, freely, from my heart. _Quietly_, caring nothing for success or failure, but just going on.... But now to resolve! And especially to keep in touch with life. With the sky, this moon, these stars, these cold candid peaks. During the following summer at Sierre in Switzerland one could have believed that Katherine Mansfield had finally accomplished the task of inward purification she had set herself, and to me it seems that there is a halcyon clarity and calm diffused through the unfinished stories written there. But she was still secretly dissatisfied with herself and her work, and in the autumn, after a brief return to London, she deliberately decided to risk everything, to abandon the writing that was dearer than all else to her, in order to achieve that newness of heart without which her work and her life seemed to her unprofitable. At the end of October she retired, by herself, to a settlement at Fontainebleau, where she found what she sought. A few days after she had taken this final step, she wrote in a letter:— “No treatment on earth is any good to me really. It’s all pretence. M. did make me heavier and a trifle stronger. But that was all, if I really face the facts. The miracle never came near happening. It couldn’t. And as for my spirit—well as a result of that life at the Victoria-Palace I stopped being a writer. I have only written long or short scraps since _The Fly_. If I had gone on with my old life, I never would have written again, for I was dying of poverty of life. I wish, when one writes about things, one didn’t dramatize them so. I feel awfully happy about all this—And it’s all as simple as can be.... But in any case I shan’t write any stories for three months, and I’ll not have a book ready before the spring. It doesn’t matter....” And again, in reply to a friend who pleaded with her not to abandon writing, she wrote, on October 26:— “As for writing stories and being true to one’s gift—I could not write them if I were not here, even. I am at an end of my source for a time. Life has brought me no _flow_. I want to write, but differently,—far more steadily.” She believed that she could not express the change that had taken place in her even in letters, though indeed her letters were radiant with happiness: “And yet I realize as I write, all this is no use. An old personality is trying to get back to the outside and observe, and it’s not true to the facts at all. What I write seems so petty. In fact I cannot express myself in writing just now. The old mechanism isn’t mine any longer and I can’t control the new. I just have to talk this baby talk.”