I have a telephone switchboard to half the rooms in the house, and the line to Pall Mall is doubled, the second wire not passing through the Company's Exchange. A switch turns on the masked lights behind the cornice, and what with one device and another, it would pay me to have a private electrician. Aunt Angela, I may say, who has managed to reconcile herself to heavier expenditures, is harrowed at the waste of electric power, and wanders about the house turning off switches. On a Jacobean table at the far end of the library are two small bright things with branches—that is to say, they seem small until you take a walk to them. They are Pepper's candlesticks. I have attained the scale.
28th March.—That impulse to destroy these papers has reminded me of a little thing that happened while I was away in Scotland. One of Hastie's boys, Ronald, aged fourteen, has a little den of his own in the back part of the house, and during my convalescence he was so good as to make me welcome there. The paraphernalia of I don't know how many hobbies littered the place; his latest had been chemistry; and he stank of chemicals, and had his clothes red-spotted with acids. His greatest success, at which I was privileged to assist, was to fill ginger-beer bottles with hydrogen and explode them. One day he invited me to witness a really superior explosion. It was lucky he did invite me. He had charged an earthenware jar, as big as a bucket, with the gas and would probably have blown the wall out. He said he didn't funk it, but I did, and we opened the window and allowed the gas to be lost.
I feel rather like that about this writing. Last night I almost made away with the dangerous stuff. But I hung back. It has cost so hideously dear. This may be a sentimentalism, and obscure, but there it is, and as it puzzles me I shall try to get to the bottom of it....
N.B.—Evie says she will soon "begin to feel that she lives here." She is getting used to having things; soon she will be getting used to having people. Soon she'll have to be thinking about her first dinner-party. Must stop now. The more sleep I get before midnight the better. I shall think about the destroying, though.
29th April.—(A month since I made an entry.) A rather curious conversation with Evie last night. You will remember that Louie Causton, trying to justify that ridiculous attitude of hers about Evie's jealousy, had exclaimed, as if that clinched something, "Why does she want to come to my house, then?" Well, she has been. Apparently she went some little time ago, but she only spoke of it last night. I shall not ask Louie for her account of it; this is Evie's:
She went on a Saturday afternoon, taking the train from Clapham Junction. Louie was just setting out with her boy to the South Kensington Museum, but she turned back. Since Kitty left her she has got another governess for the lad, but she still devotes her Saturdays and Sundays to him. There are several things about Evie's account I am not quite clear about, but I admit that she has no great gift for picking out the essentials of a conversation, and perhaps unconsciously she has emphasised the wrong things. She told me, for example, a good deal about Master Jim, but said very little about Kitty's reason for going over to Miriam Levey. She wandered off into old recollections of the Business College in Holborn that I had forgotten all about, and allowed these things to divert her from the visit itself. I had to ask her whether Louie seemed comfortable in her rooms, whether they were decently furnished or not, and so on; and she said, "Oh, of course, you've never seen them," and described them to me in excellent detail. Then suddenly she asked me whether Miss Lingard (who had been away out of sorts), was back at the Consolidation yet. Miss Lingard was my own private amanuensis, and during her absence Louie had had to help with her work.... And so we talked. This was in our own bedroom, while Evie was making ready for the night.
"Well," I said, yawning, "and what did you talk about besides the Holborn days?"
"Oh, lots of things," she answered brightly, busily brushing. "She's got to look older since then—but I daresay you wouldn't notice that, seeing her every day."
"Louie Causton, you mean?"