For Cressida it was spiritually like some pagan vegetation rite of regeneration and renewal. In the sunburnt pepper-and-salt of Provencal landscape, in the sunny blue light of the Mediterranean, amid rocks and olives, in the carefree, slower, winy, singing zest of the Latin south, she seemed reborn; she responded to it all like a string plucked on an instrument. She was still beautiful, more beautiful in her late twenties than ever she had been, but repolished now by recapturing of the earlier joy and vivacity. Yet when the time came to turn north again she always went ungrudgingly, drawn now by a hunger and anxiety for her children, who during these holidays stayed at a pleasant farm school in Hertfordshire, because, as she would say, 'They must be getting sick to death of the food up there; I know the poor' things loathe the fish they get. ' For Meredith these European vacations were essential in a different way for tonic and therapeutic rather than for spiritual values. By the end of a second year in London the strain of attempting to do two demanding and highly concentrated jobs was beginning seriously to tell on him, he was being mauled also by the division in his interests. He had by this time had two novels published by a Bloomsbury firm highly distinguished in the mare rarefied levels of poetry., belles-lettres, drama, criticism, free arts, and scholarship, but just feeling its way, not entirely successfully, into the world of fiction with more hurly-burly. So that while Meredith could raise eyebrows (being Australian) at literary cocktail' parties by saying who his publishers were, his advances on royalties were very small and his sales so inconsiderable as never to justify expectation of any further sum beyond the initial royalty payment. On the other hand, both books, possibly because of the publisher's imprint, had received passing commendation of a sort in a number of the better literary columns. While far from being hailed as a 'discovery' there were little measures of praise for some aspects of his writing and two critics even saw indications of 'some considerable promise', this apprehension, of course, being substantially qualified by what the critics then went on to say. Meredith, none the less, was immensely encouraged, and feverishly went to work on his 'big' novel, a very ambitious historical reconstruction of the passing of the Ming Dynasty. Writing this in spare hours at night after the pressures of a full day's newspaper work, he pushed himself very close to a breakdown—he was also drinking pretty heavily as a stimulant between the two tasks—mad Cressida forced him finally to consult Carl Kronfeld, her doctor, who obligingly prescribed drugs for three weeks to enable Meredith to complete the novel, but was impelled to utter a warning. Though Cressida enjoyed the vacations completely,