April 13.—I have just come from the Kahns'. Certainly there is no music like this old, tinkling, unwearied music of Greger's for giving one a sort of phantom or ghostly peace, as if the present faded into the distance, and life became a memory, half sad and half happy, and above all not too poignant. I can no longer allow myself to hear Wagner, much less Tschaikowsky: music made to make people suffer.
Of course the Baroness was there. She sat by me at dinner, but on my left, and I could only see the unspoilt half of her face. Every now and then I thought of the other half, and a kind of sickness came over me. Once I turned to my other neighbour, in the middle of a sentence. But, for the most part, I forgot, and then it seemed to me that I was talking with the most accomplished woman I had ever met. She has travelled, knows many languages, many people; she has the feeling, and, I think, some of the knowledge of an artist; we spoke of music, painting, the art of living; and, oddly enough, she has a passion for just my own subject; history is her favourite reading, and when I spoke of one of my own hobbies, of Attila, she quoted Jornandes, and a passage, I remembered, that Thierry has not translated: she must have read it in Latin. How has she found time to do all this? To me she does not seem very young, but I suppose she is very little over forty. She spoke of everything with great frankness; only, never of herself. I have hardly spoken to the husband, to whom I have never seen her speak. He is very tall, very dark, very thin, with an air of politeness so excessive that it seems a kind of irony. She has asked me to come and see her; she promises me the use of her library. Can I, I wonder, ever get the better of that repugnance which rises in me when I see the ragged mask, the mended eyelid?
April 14.—I have been filling these pages with rumours and apprehensions, and now, just when I least expected it, something definite has happened, which seems to make them all very trivial and secondary. The Argonaut Building Society, into which I had put nearly all the little money I had, has failed; there has been swindling; I am ruined. What am I to do? I shall have to earn my living, heaven knows how; I shall have to give up my work, sell my books, find some cheaper rooms. This is the one thing I never thought would happen. I have been afraid of most things but poverty, and now it is poverty which has come upon me. Perhaps something will be saved out of the wreck of this false Argonaut. I must wait until I know for certain that there is nothing.
April 15.—I called on the Baroness von Eckenstein. I did not expect to see such a library. It was made by three generations of savants, and continued by herself. There are folios not in the British Museum; one that I had come to think had never existed. If she will really let me sometimes use her library, I can sell my books cheerfully. She has a remarkable intelligence. But for that scar she would have been singularly handsome. What can have caused it, I wonder? It is like the scar which I once saw on the face of a woman over whom her rival had thrown vitriol. I am far from supposing any such vulgar tragedy in the household of the Eckensteins!
April 16.—No further news yet from the Argonaut. I can only anticipate the worst. Nothing but rain without, and this intolerable suspense in one's mind. I can neither work nor think.
April 17.—To-day the weather has changed, and see how this barometer of my nerves registers the change! I have been walking in Regent's Park, the nearest country, and I feel singularly good, wise, and happy. That uninteresting park, uninteresting in itself, has a gift of refreshment, as one turns into it out of the streets. I find myself leaning against the railing to watch a little dark creature with red legs and a red bill, that swims between the swans, and clambers up on the grass, and runs about there stealthily with a shy grace. There is an island, to which all the water-birds go, and it is grown over with trees and bushes and green weeds, down to the edge of the water, and they go there when they want to be alone, as one goes into a deep wood, out of the streets in which people stare. To-day I was perfectly happy, merely walking about the park. I sat under a tree for half an hour, and it was only when I realised that a queer sound which had come to me at intervals, a mournful and deep cry, which I had heard in a kind of dream, was the crying of the wild beasts, over yonder, inside their bars, that I got up and came away.