Why I sit boring you with this dull stuff I do not know: it is certainly not worth including in the Life and Letters.
Two days of solitude set him athirst for companionship.
Good-morning, fair sir, he writes on 12.6.16. I hope this finds you as it leaves me at present, a little improved in health. But I would not wish my worst enemy the weariness from which I am suffering.... Picture me buying useless things so that I may exchange a word with a shopman; for no one talks to me here. Also the weather is bitterly cold.
And next day:
I have ... talked at length to a highly intelligent Dane, with a massy pair of calves that do credit to his pastoral country. But he has returned to town this morning.
They play very low at the club, fortunately, for I lost 13/-, which would have been £10, had I been playing R.A.C. points. Also they make me too late to dress for dinner, which doesn’t matter: nothing matters in this world.
For the rest, I have reason to think that I shall begin to cheer up from to-morrow and to remain cheerful until Saturday. That is “speech-day”—I presume at Malvern College—when I expect to see an awful invasion of horribobble papas and mammas.
Bless you.
The hoped-for cheerfulness has not yet arrived, he laments on 14.6.16. I live in one of the most tragic of worlds. But ... I have had more conversation. The place of the Dane with the fatted calves ... has been taken by a parson, a passon, a parsoon, an elderly parsoon with the complete manner of the late Mr. Penley in The Private Secretary: he would like to give every German a good, hard slap, I am sure. He is a much-travelled man; and his ignorance of every place which he has visited is thoroughly entertaining....