Twenty-nine
No art that is not planned in form is worth consideration, and no life that is not planned in convention can ever be satisfactory.
Thirty
The value of restraint is seldom inculcated upon women. Indeed, its opposites—gush and a tendency to hysteria—are regarded, in many respectable quarters, as among the proper attributes of true womanliness; attributes to be artistically cultivated.
Thirty-one
There grows in the North Country a certain kind of youth of whom it may be said that he is born to be a Londoner. The metropolis, and everything that appertains to it, that comes down from it, that goes up into it, has for him an imperious fascination. Long before schooldays are over he learns to take a doleful pleasure in watching the exit of the London train from the railway station. He stands by the hot engine and envies the very stoker. Gazing curiously into the carriages he wonders that men and women, who in a few hours will be treading streets called Piccadilly and the Strand, can contemplate the immediate future with so much apparent calmness; some of them even have the audacity to look bored. He finds it difficult to keep from throwing himself in the guard’s van as it glides past him; and not until the last coach is a speck upon the distance does he turn away and, nodding absently to the ticket-clerk, who knows him well, go home to nurse a vague ambition and dream of town.
[59]
June
One
To cultivate and nourish a grievance when you have five hundred pounds in your pocket, in cash, is the most difficult thing in the world.