Grand Hôtel des Wagon-lits. April 17th. Later.
I HELPED Heloise get her things back to our little hotel last night. Then I packed a bag and came over here and took a room.
She did n't say anything when I told her I was going to do this. But I am sure she realizes that it is the only thing to do. It disturbs me to think of her alone over there. But now that she is known to half the white people in Peking, I will not permit myself to stay there with her. I will not have her talked about on any new grounds. And now that I am beginning to understand her, I see clearly enough that I must protect her. Lately it has seemed to me that none of the more artificial restraints that society accepts as necessary details of a working code mean much to her.
I begin to think that in certain fine ways women are more primitive than men. In the sense, I mean, that their deeper emotional nature lies closer to the roots of life than ours does. They are more elementally natural, harder to sophisticate. They feel more swiftly and surely, without the elaborate intellectual machinery that men find it necessary to call into use in order to arrive at conclusions. In certain respects they are deeper and bigger than we are.
I have read all this in the books, of course—years ago—but never before believed it in the sense that belief implies personal experience and understanding.
April 18th. Morning. (At the Wagon-lits).
YES, I was right in moving over here. Heloise admitted it to-day. I asked her if she did n't agree with me, and she said she had come to think that my judgment is better than hers in these matters. God knows, I am unworldly enough—sometimes I feel that she and I are nothing but a couple of babes in the woods of life—but at least I am a bit more worldly than she.