I called Lillie and it's all set up. She was going to Haven House tonight to have dinner with her brother, and she said she'd ask him if Mark and I could spend the nights there. Although, in a sense, it's not so much a matter of asking him as asking the House.

It was actually kind of good that we called, Lillie said. She's got a new group of letters from Nineveh Brown to W. B. Yeats that she wants me to look at and help her catalogue. (The idea being to get them in order so that they can be cross-referenced, or whatever, with the letters from Yeats to Nineveh...which have been part of the Collection since 1931 when Edmund Brown died and left his sister's papers to posterity, or at least that part of posterity that has access to the Danae y Danae Archives.

These "new" letters were, of course, the ones that Yeats kept, and after his death I'd be inclined to think they went to some museum or other. I wonder whether Lillie bought them legally or paid someone in the St. Ia family to steal them for her.

Not that I'll ask her...I expect, if they're stolen, we'll soon be hearing about it anyway, as Mark's mother works at the V&A in London, and likes to regale him with the latest scandals in the world of antiquities. Some of which we already know about from a rather different perspective, which is awkward but kind of funny.)

I think this notion that Mark and I have any particular insights to add to the letters is silly. But I don't mind taking a look at them, and helping to enter them into the catalogues. It's kind of ridiculous, though, that I should be the fastest typist. I type 25 words a minute, for crying out loud. But Mark can't touch-type at all, he has to do hunt-and-peck, which is why I write up most of his papers for him (it's not, believe me, for the pleasure of listening to him dictate and getting into arguments with him about syntax). And Lillie is seriously slowed down by having to wear gloves, or else being hit by every word that every key has ever helped spell every time someone has used the keyboard. Which is just ridiculous, obviously.

But considering how early we're going to have to get up to get to Santa Teresa before late, I'd better get to bed. Or my own hands will be shaking so hard even Mark will be faster. He's been in bed for an hour and forty-five minutes, and has been rolling over and complaining the entire time about the sound of my typing keeping him awake. I think I'll put up the volume on the stereo and dig out my Dr. Demento CD. And then run really fast, and lock the door to the bathroom behind me. He should be done yelling at me by the time I'm done with my bath.