When you have two people who love each other$$$ are happy and gay and really good work is being done by one or both of them$$$ people are drawn to them as surely as migrating birds are drawn at night to a powerful beacon. If the two people were as solidly constructed as the beacon there would be little damage except to the birds. Those who attract people by their happiness and their performance are usually inexperienced. They do not know how not to be overrun and how to go away.

For luck you carried a horse chestnut and a rabbit’s foot in your right pocket. The fur had been worn off the rabbit’s foot long ago and the bones and the sinews were polished by the wear. The claws scratched in the lining of your pocket and you knew your luck was still there.

Then I started to think in Lipp’s about when I had first been able to write a story about losing everything. It was up in Cortina d’Ampezzo when I had come back to join Hadley there after the spring skiing which I had to interrupt to go on assignment to Rhineland and the Ruhr. It was a very simple story called ‘Out of Season’ and I had omitted the real end of it which was that the old man hanged himself.

I always worked until I had something done and I always stopped when I knew what was going to happen next. That way I could be sure of going on the next day.

To have come on all this new world of writing$$$ with time to read in a city like Paris where there was a way of living well and working$$$ no matter how poor you were$$$ was like having a great treasure given to you.

Below Les Avants there was a chalet where the pension was wonderful and we would be together and have our books and at night be warm in bed together with the windows open and the stars bright.

You can either buy clothes or buy pictures$$$" she said. "It's that simple. No one who is not very rich can do both. Pay no attention to your clothes and no attention at all to the mode$$$ and buy your clothes for comfort and durability$$$ and you will have the clothes money to buy pictures.

They say the seeds of what we will do are in all of us$$$ but it always seemed to me that in those who make jokes in life the seeds are covered with better soil and with a higher grade of manure.

As I ate the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold white wine washed away$$$ leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture$$$ and as I drank their cold liquid from each shell and washed it down with the crisp taste of the wine$$$ I lost the empty feeling and began to be happy and to make plans.

The one who is doing his work and getting satisfaction from it is not the one the poverty is hard on.