I keep remembering what Lois said about not sentimentalizing a situation. But I’m not yet such a mush of concession that I can’t tell black from white. And there’s some part of us, some vague but unescapable part of us, which we must respect, otherwise we have no right to walk God’s good earth....
I want to get away, for a day or two, to think things out. I think, before Duncan gets back to-morrow, I shall take Poppsy and run up to Banff. I may get my view-point back. And the mountain quietness may do me good....
I keep having that same dull ache of disappointment which came to me as a girl, after I’d idolized a great man called Meredith and after I’d almost prayed to a great poet called Browning, on finding that one was so imperfectly monogamous and that the other philandered and talked foolishly to women. I had thrust my girlish faith in their hands, as so often befalls with the young, and they had betrayed it.... But for the second time since I married, I have been reading Modern Love. And I can almost forgive the Apollo of Box Hill for that betrayal which he knew nothing about.
Thursday the Twenty-Eighth
This is Thursday the twenty-eighth of April. I want to be sure of that. For there are very few things I can be sure of now.
The bottom has fallen out of my world. I sit here, telling myself to be calm. But it’s not easy to sit quiet when you face the very worst that all life could confront you with. My Dinkie has run away.
My boy has left me, has left his home, has vanished like smoke into the Unknown. He is gone and I have no trace of him.
I find it hard to write. Yet I must write, for the mere expression of what I feel tends to ease the ache. It helps to keep me sane. And already I realize I was wrong when I wrote “the very worst that all life could confront you with.” For my laddie, after all, is not dead. He must still be alive. And while there’s life, there’s hope.