It might conciliate the clerics if you adopted this illustration. But as YOUR OWN, mind. I should not like them to think me capable of it.
[However, even Ilkley was not an infallible cure. Thus he writes to
Sir M. Foster:—]
May 17.
I am ashamed of myself for not going to town to attend the Government Grant Committee and Council, but I find I had better stop here till the end of the month, when I must return for a while anyhow.
I have improved very much here, and so long as I take heaps of exercise every day I have nothing to complain of beyond a fit of blue devils when I wake in the morning.
But I don't want to do any manner of work, still less any manner of play, such as is going on in London at this time of year, and I think I am wise to keep out of it as long as I can.
I wish I knew what is the matter with me. I feel always just on the verge of becoming an absurd old hypochondriac, and as if it only wanted a touch to send me over.
May 27.
…The blue devils worry me far less than they did. If there were any herd of swine here I might cast them out altogether, but I expect they would not go into blackfaced sheep.
I am disposed to stop not more than ten days in London, but to come back here and bring some work with me. In fact I do not know that I should return yet if it were not that I do not wish to miss our usual visit to Balliol, and that my Spanish daughter is coming home for a few months…