It is simply dreadful that you should suffer so much and that doctors should be such useless fools…. What can one say? I know so devilishly well the agony of feeling perpetually ill and the longing—the immense longing just to have what everybody else takes so easily as their portion—health—a body that isn't an enemy—a body that isn't fiendishly engaged in the old, old ‘necessary’ torture of—breaking one's spirit—

“Why won't you consent to having your spirit broken?” it wonderingly asks. “Everybody else yields without a murmur. And if you'd only realise the comfortable, boundless numbness that you would enjoy for ever after—” I wonder sometimes how it will end. One will never give in and so—All the same it would be more tolerable if only people understood—ever so little—but subtly—not with a sort of bread jelly sympathy—but with exquisite, rare friendship. (Oh, dear, I still believe in such a thing and still long for it.)

You see, I cannot help it. My secret belief—the innermost ‘credo’ by which I live is—that although Life is loathsomely ugly and people are terribly often vile and page 205 cruel and base, nevertheless there is something at the back of it all—which if only I were great enough to understand would make everything, everything, indescribably beautiful. One just has glimpses, divine warnings—signs—Do you remember the day we cut the lavender? And do you remember when the Russian music sounded in that half-empty hall? Oh, those memories compensate for more than I can say—