It's 7 a.m., and I just rolled out of bed . . . an unbelievably late rise time for me. I'm still trying to unstick myself from my dream. The romantic male lead and I were in our little house. I knew that soon all of our acquaintances would be arriving in a flurry, desperate to barricade themselves inside with us, and we'd spend the rest of time frantically defending against an enemy onslaught. So my bright idea was: Let's change the setting and the time period, honey, and everything will be fine.

If that's not a writer's dream, I don't know what is. First, I get to shack up with Handsome Guy. Then I predict trouble. Then I rewrite the script to avoid it. Then I return to my romance situation with Handsome Guy. All problems solved.

Ah, dream world.

In real life, overnight rain soaks the towels and sheets on the line, and the cat shoves his nose into my face, nagging me to get out of bed and let him out. The romantic lead dozes over his coffee, and the script remains plodding and obscure, though on the bright side there are no legions of enemies galloping down the street and we're not transforming our windows into arrow slits and my house is not packed to the gills with neighbors and cows.

Outside, the fog is thick and briny, and the local songbirds are haunting my blueberry bushes, determined to overcome the netting obstacle. I think the weather will brighten, eventually, and maybe the laundry will dry, and maybe I'll mow grass. Tonight the romantic lead and I are going out to dinner, and I hope we will have no trouble with invaders on horseback.

I've started rereading Sybille Bedford's A Legacy, which is right up there with Lampedusa's The Leopard in its evocation of a particular vibrating time and place. The Leopard is set among mid-nineteenth-century Sicilian nobility, whereas A Legacy is a strange and opulent Edwardian Europe. Here's a taste:

In the year 1891, Manet and Seurat were already dead; Pissaro, Monet and Renoir were at their height of powers; Cezanne had opened yet another world. Sunday at la Grande Jatte and le Dejeuner dan le Bois, la Musique aux Tuileries, les Dames dans un Jardin, the ochre farms and tawny hills of Aix were there, on canvas, hung, looked at--to be seen by anybody who would learn to see. And so were the shimmering trees, the sun-speckled paths, the fluffy fields, the light, the dancing air, the water--But were they seen? Were they walked, were they lived in? Did ladies come out into the garden in the morning holding a silver tea-pot? did flesh-and-blood governesses advance towards one waist-high in corn and poppies, clutching a bunch of blossoms? did young men dip their hands into the pool and young women laugh in swings? Did gentlemen really put their top-hats in the grass?

For the age of the Impressionists was also still the age of decorum and pomposity, of mahogany and the basement kitchen, the overstuffed interior and the stucco villa; an age that venerated old, rich, malicious women and the clever banker; when places of public entertainment were large, pilastered and vulgar, and anyone who was neither a sportsman, poor, not very young, sat down on a stiff-backed chair three times a day eating an endless meal indoors.

My father [Jules] talked little about this middle period of his life. But others knew him, saw him, talked, survived; and I know that on the French Riviera in the Nineties Jules Felden drove a team of mules--