All this week I have been most fearfully busy with a long story which was only finished late last night. Finished it is, however. Thanks be to God. It's called The Garden-Party, and I have decided to call my new book by that title instead of the other. In the meantime the Mercury is bringing out that very long seaweedy story of mine At the Bay. I feel inclined to suggest to them to give away a spade an' bucket with each copy…

Oh, how I saw that awful party! What a nightmare! I have a perfect horror of such affairs! They are always the same. One has to be encased in vanity like a beetle to escape being hurt. And the ghastly thing is they are so hard to forget; one lives them over and over. Don't go to them. But what's the use of saying that; there are times when one has to go. It's difficult to see what compensations there are in city life. I think the best plan is to live away from them and then, when one has done a good deal of work and wants a holiday, take a real holiday in a place like Paris, or Madrid or even London (but not for me London). It is nice sometimes to be with many people and to hear music and to be ‘overcome’ by a play and to watch dancing. Walking in streets is nice, too. But one always wants to have an avenue of escape. One wants to feel a stranger, for these things to have their charm, and—most important of all—one wants to have a solid body of work behind one. The longer I live the more I realise that in work only lies one's strength and one's salvation. And such supreme joy that one gives thanks for life with every breath.

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Midday. Oh, why can't you hear that darling little bell in the valley? It's misty to-day, and the sun shines and the mist is silver. It's still. And somewhere there rings over and over that little chime, so forgetful, so easy, so gay. It's like a gay little pattern, gold and butterflies and cherubs with trumpets in the very middle of the page—so that one pauses before one begins the afternoon chapter. We are going for a picnic. We take the jaeger rug and the bastick. And then we lie under a tree. Stir our tea with a twig, look up, look down, wonder why. But it begins to get dark earlier. At seven o'clock the moon is in full feather on my balcony…