his manners, ludicrous in the wrongness of all his views. But I like him just because he is so hopeless. I get on with him because it is so impossible to reclaim him—my missionary spirit is not intrigued. If he only dabbled in vice (for an experiment), if he had pale, watery ideas about current literature—if—to use his own favourite epithet—he were genteel, I should quarrel.
Having developed a passion for a piece of sculpture by R. Boeltzig called the Reifenwerferin—the most beautiful figure of a woman. I am already devoted to Rodin’s Kiss and have a photo of it framed in my bedroom. Have written to Bruciani’s.
I suspect that my growing appreciation of the plastic art is with me only distilled sensuality. I enjoy my morning bath for the same reason. My bath is a daily baptism. I revel in the pleasure of the pain of the cold water. I whistle gleefully because I am clean and cool and nude early in the morning with the sun still low, before the day has been stained by clothes, dirt, pain, exasperation, death. … How I love myself as I rub myself down!—the cool, pink skin—I could eat it! I want to be all day in a cold bath to enjoy the pain of mortifying the flesh—it is so beautiful, so soft, so inscrutable—if I cut out chunks of it, it would only bleed.
The other morning R⸺ said hyperbolically that he hadn’t slept all night for fear that, before he had time to put an arresting hand on my shoulder and say “Don’t,” I might have gone and become “Entangled.” …
… No, I’m as firm as a rock, my dear. But in imagination the affair was continued as follows—
She: “I am fond of you, you know.”
He: “I wish you wouldn’t say these things to me—they’re quite embarrassing.”
She: “Oh! my dear, I’m not serious, you know—you’re such a vain young man.”
He: “Well, it’s equally embarrassing anyway.”
She: “Then I am serious.”
Tears.
I say: “I wish you would take me only for what I am—a blackguard with no good intentions, yet no very evil ones—but still a blackguard, whom you seem to find has engaging manners.”
I breathe freely hoping to have escaped this terrible temptation and turn to go. But she, looking up smiling through a curtain of wet eyelashes, asks—
“Won’t the blackguard stop a little longer?” In a moment my earth works, redoubts, and bastions fall down, I rush forward impetuously into her arms shouting, “I will, I will, I will as long as for eternity.”
(Curtain.)
I dramatised this little picture and much more last night before going to sleep when I was in a fever. I should succumb at once to the first really skilful coquette.
Ludo
We played Ludo together this evening and she won 2s. 6d. Handsomely gowned in black and wearing black ornaments, she sat with me in the lamplight on the sofa in the Morris Room, with the Ludo board between us placed on a large green cushion. Her face was white as parchment and her hair seemed an ebony black. I lolled in the opposite corner, a thin, elongated youth, with fair hair all stivered up, dressed in a light-brown lounge suit with a good trouser crease, a soft linen collar and—a red tie! Between us, on its green cushion the Ludo board with its brilliantly coloured squares:—all of it set before a background formed by the straight-backed, rectangular, settle-like sofa, with a charming covering which went with the rest of the scheme.
“Rather decorative,” ⸻ remarked in an audible voice, turning her head on one side and quizzing. I can well believe it was. She looked wholly admirable.
My Nightmare
Can’t get rid of my cough. I have so many things to do—I am living in a fever of haste to get them done. Yet this cough hinders me. There is always something which drags me back from the achievement of my desires. It’s like a nightmare; I see myself struggling violently to escape from a monster which draws continuously nearer, until his shadow falls across my path, when I begin to run and find my legs tied, etc. The only difference is that mine is a nightmare from which I never wake up. The haven of successful accomplishment remains as far off as ever. Oh! make haste.
The English Review has returned my Essay!—This is a keen disappointment to me. “I wish I could use this, but I am really too full,” the Editor writes. To be faintly encouraged and delicately rejected—why I prefer the printed form.
More Irony
Renewed my cold—I do nothing all day but blow my nose, cough, and curse Austin Harrison.
M⸺ thinks the lungs are all right. “There is nothing there, I think,” said he, this morning. Alleluia! I’ve had visions of consumption for weeks past and M⸺ himself has been expecting it. I always just escape: I always almost get something, do something, go somewhere, I have dabbled in a variety of diseases, but never got one downright10—but only enough to make me feel horribly unfit and very miserable without the consolation of being able to regard myself as the heroic victim of some incurable disorder. Instead of being Stevenson with tuberculosis, I’ve only been Jones with dyspepsia. So, too, in other directions, big events have always just missed me: by Herculean efforts I succeeded in giving up newspaper journalism and breaking through that steel environment—but only to become an Entomologist! I once achieved success in an Essay in the Academy, which attracted attention—a debut, however, that never developed. I had not quite arrived. It is always not quite.
Yesterday, I received a state visit from the Editor of the Furniture Record seeking advice on how to eradicate mites from upholstering! I received him ironically—but little did
