I'm rather dashed to-day. I've got fever and that makes me frightfully depressed. Ansaldi came yesterday. Don't count on him. He's a charlatan. He owned yesterday that the reports he gave me were because “I saw dis lady wants vot you call sheering up. Like de Irishman I told you you can trot and I hope you may be able to walk.” You observe the polite smile with which I listened. The whole interview seems to have been more page 309 or less of a fake. He said yesterday, for instance, emphatically that I could not winter in England next year or the year after: that I must have sun and warmth. In fact, he behaved precisely as all other doctors in the world but S. do behave. S. is the only man one can trust at all. This one wasn't like D. in the face for nothing. He did give me a good beating. And when I told him of my melancholia, he said it was part toxin poisoning and part because you are alone wiz nobody near you to love and sherish you. I tell my patients dat is better than medicine. Mrs. Murry, and so on and so on and so on and so on. And then he went away and I sat in my dressing gown and watched it grow dusk and then dark here, and realised how I had been taken in again.

Doesn't matter. What must be, must be. I am writing to J. to-day to ask her if I may come to Mentone for a few days. But what's the good? I couldn't go to-day. My temperature's 102. So one goes round and round and round like the squirrel in the cage. It's a cold, grey day.