Here's an absurd situation! My doctor strongly urges me not to put myself away, not to go into a sanatorium—he says I would be out of it in 24 hours and it would be a “highly dangerous experiment.” You see,” he explained, “there is your work which I know is your life. If they kept it from you you'd die—then they would keep it from you. This would sound absurd to a German specialist but I have attended you for a year and I know.” After this, I with great difficulty restrained my impulse to tell the doctor what his words did for me. They were breath, life—healing, everything. So it is the Italian Riviera after all, a maid to travel with me and a little villa—Being ill and bearing all the depression of those round me had, I think, almost made me insane. I just gave up hope. Now I am full of hope again, and I am off the third week in September. M. is going across the first week in September to find me a villa and then I go. It is a blessed relief. And to think there will be the sun and another summer and unlimited time to write—It is next door to Heaven.

Life is so strange—so full of extraordinary things…. To-day, this afternoon, waiting for my Father to come to tea—I felt I could have made—but only of that waiting— page 242 a whole book. I began thinking of all the time one has ‘waited’ for so many and strange people and things—the special quality it has—the agony of it and the strange sense that there is a second you who is outside yourself and does nothing—nothing but just listen—the other complicated you goes on—and then there is this keen, unsleeping creature—waiting to leap—It is like a dark beast and he who comes is its prey—

Everybody has deserted me—I don't hear from a soul.