“You have come through it all remarkably well” ... remarkable had a k in it in English, and German, merkwürdig, and perhaps in Scandinavian languages; but not in other languages; it was one of the things that separated England from the south ... remarkable ... hard and chilly.
“You know you’re awfully good stuff. You’ve had an extraordinary variety of experience; you’ve got your freedom; you ought to write.”
“That is what a palmist told me at Newlands. It was at a big afternoon ‘at home’; there was a palmist in a little dark room sitting near a lamp; she looked at nothing but your hands; she kept saying whatever you do, write. If you haven’t written yet, write, if you don’t succeed go on writing.”
“Just so, have you written?”
“Ah, but she also told me my self-confidence had been broken; that I used to be self-confident and was so no longer. It’s true.”
“Have you written anything?”
“I once sent in a thing to Home Notes. They sent it back but asked me to write something else and suggested a few things.”
“If they had taken your stuff you would have gone on and learnt to turn out stuff bad enough for Home Notes and gone on doing it for the rest of your life.”
“But then an artist, a woman who had a studio in Bond Street and knew Leighton, saw some things I had tried to paint and said I ought to make any sacrifice to learn painting, and a musician said the same about music.”
“You could work in writing quite well with your present work.”