I've just got back from Dr. B. I expect you'd like to know what he's like. He seems to me a very decent, intelligent soul—quite as good as any other doctor. He approved absolutely of my life and conditions of life here and is going to keep an eye on me. The result of his examination was the eternal same. Of course, one can see that the disease is of long standing but there is no reason why—provided—subject to—if—and so on and so on. Not in the least depressing. Yet the foolish creature always does expect the doctor to put down his stethoscope to turn to her and say—with quiet confidence: “I can cure you, Mrs. Murry.”

He has the same disease himself. I recognised his smile —just the least shade too bright and his strange joyousness as he came to meet one—just the least shade too pronounced page 56 his air of being a touch more alive than other people—the gleam—the faint glitter on the plant that the frost has laid a finger on… He is only about 33, and I feel that his experience at the war had changed him. In fact, he seemed to me fully like what a young Duhamel might be. I'm to go on just as I'm going until he sees me again, i.e., half an hour's walk—the rest of the time in my chaise longue. There's really nothing to tell. He had such a charming little old-fashioned photograph in a round frame on his mantlepiece—faded—but so delightful—a girl with her curls pinned back and a velvet ribbon round her throat… His mother, I suppose. This seemed to me more important than all else.

It's 3.30, Sunday afternoon. Marie is out and L. M. has gone off to tea with some cronies and a french poodle. So I have the house to myself. It's a cloudy, windless day. There is such a great stretch of sky to be seen from my terrasse that one's always conscious of the clouds. One forgets that clouds are in London and here they are—how shall I put it—they are a changing background to the silence. Extraordinary how many planes one can see—one cloud and behind it another and then a lake and on the far side of the lake a mountain. I wonder if you would feed on this visible world as I do. I was looking at some leaves only yesterday—idly looking and suddenly I became conscious of them—of the amazing ‘freedom’ with which they were ‘drawn’—of the life in each curve—but not as something outside oneself, but as part of one—as though like a magician I could put forth my hand and shake a green branch into my fingers from …? And I feel as though one received—accepted—absorbed the beauty of the leaves even into one's physical being. Do you feel like that about things?

Ah, but you would have loved the golden moth that flew in here last night. It had a head like a tiny owl, a body covered with down—wings divided into minute feathers and powdered with gold. I felt it belonged to a poem.

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Tomlinson's story was very good.¹ It just missed it, though at the end. I mean judging from the Tchehov standpoint. The thing I prize, admire, and respect in his stories is his knowledge. They are true. I trust him. This is becoming most awfully important to me—a writer must have knowledge—he must make one feel the ground is firm beneath his feet. The vapourings I read, the gush, wind—give one a perfect Sehnsucht for something hard to bite on.

I don't know whether it's I that have ‘fallen behind’ in this procession but truly the books I read nowadays astound me. Female writers discovering a freedom, a frankness, a license, to speak their hearts reveal themselves as … sex maniacs. There's not a relationship between a man and woman that isn't the one sexual relationship—at its lowest. Intimacy is the sexual act. I am terribly ashamed to tell the truth; it's a very horrible exposure.