I’m going to get up and drink a glass of orange juice. Then I’m going to go out in the garden and see what I can do for the flowers. There are some dead leaves on the lilies that need to come off and there are some that need propping. I could clip the seed pods from the roses that have bloomed to help keep up the succession. I can find a world of things to do. Then we will arrange a dinner that will have at least a tendency to be what you might call a gesture in the direction of making a real man out of particularly big bones and peculiarly flabby muscle. I’m going to walk down to a place on the beach that I call the throne and I am going to sit there, and thoroughly wrapped in the Master’s eiderdown dressing robe and his old working overcoat on top of it so that I cannot possibly chill, I am going to breathe fog and mist and salt water until my tongue tastes salty in my mouth. I am going to lie down there and go to sleep, if I take the notion.”
Margaret Cameron stretched out her hand.
“Now, look here, Jamie,” she said, “you’re all right up to that point, but you had better cut that right out. You had better not try sleeping outdoors in fog and mist. Maybe it’s all right to go and breathe it for an hour, but don’t go to sleep and let your circulation run down and the fog settle over you and wet you and chill you to the bone. That’s a wrong idea. Change that part of your programme, and as for the rest, I’ll think hard all day, and you think hard, and this evening we’ll talk it over and see if we cannot make out the menu you want to follow. You try with all your might and I’ll try with all my might and
