'We are going to Vicomile to-morrow afternoon.
'He asked me—"Would it tire you too much to come on horseback? In that way we could cut right through the pine wood!"
'So we are going to ride and Francesca will join us. The others, including Delfina, will come in the mail-coach.
'What a strange state of mind I am in this evening! I feel a kind of dull and angry bitterness at the bottom of my heart, without knowing why—am impatient with myself, my life, the whole world—my nervous irritation rises, at times, to such a pitch, that I am seized with an insane desire to scream aloud, to dig my nails into my flesh, to bruise my fingers against the wall—any physical suffering would be better than this intolerable mental discomfort, this unbearable wretchedness. I feel as if I had a burning knot in my bosom, that my throat were closed by a sob I dared not give vent to—I am icy cold and burning hot by turns and, from time to time, a sudden pang darts through me, an irrational terror that I can neither shake off nor control. Thoughts and images flash suddenly across my brain, coming from I know not what ignoble depths of my soul.
'October 3rd.—How weak and miserable is the human soul, how utterly defenceless against the attacks of all that is least noble and least pure in us, and that slumbers in the obscurity of our unconscious life, in those unexplored abysses where dark dreams are born of hidden sensations!
'A dream can poison a whole soul, a single involuntary thought is sufficient to corrupt and break down the force of will.
'We are just starting for Vicomile. Delfina is in raptures.
'It is the festival of Our Lady of the Rosary. Courage, my heart!
'October 4th.—I found no courage.
'Yesterday was so full of trifling incidents and great emotions, so joyful and so sad, so strangely agitating that I am almost at a loss when I try to remember it all. And yet all—all other recollections pale and vanish before the one.