... She is a very great deal to me. Perhaps I love her very much after all.
May 3.
Bad heart attack all day. Intermittency is very refined torture to one who wants to live very badly. Your pump goes a "dot and carry one," or say "misses a stitch," what time you breathe deep, begin to shake your friend's hand and make a farewell speech. Then it goes on again and you order another pint of beer.
It is a fractious animal within the cage of my thorax, and I never know when it is going to escape and make off with my precious life between its teeth. I humour and coax and soothe it, but, God wot, I haven't much confidence in the little beast. My thorax it appears is an intolerable kennel.
May 10.
In a very cheerful mood. Pleased with myself and everybody till a seagull soared overhead in Kensington Gardens and aroused my vast capacities for envy—I wish I could fly.
May 24.
In L—— with my brother, A——. The great man is in great form and very happy in his love for N——. He is a most delightful creature and I love him more than any one else in the wide world. There is an almost feminine tenderness in my love.
We spent a delightful day, talking and arguing and insulting one another.... At these seances we take delight in anaesthetising our hearts for the purposes of argument, and a third person would be bound to suppose we were in the throes of a bitter quarrel. We pile up one vindictive remark on another, ingeniously seeking out—and with malice—weak points in each other's armour, which previous exchange of confidences makes it easy to find. Neither of us hesitates to make use of such private confessions, yet our love is so strong that we can afford to take any liberty. There is, in fact, a fearful joy in testing the strength of our affection by searching for cutting rejoinders—to see the effect. We rig up one another's cherished ideals like Aunt Sallies and then knock them down, we wax sarcastic, satirical, contemptuous in turn, we wave our hands animatedly (hand-waving is a great trick with both of us), get flushed, point with our fingers, and thump the table to clinch some bit of repartee. Yet it's all smoke. Our love is unassailable—it's like the law of gravitation, you cannot dispute it, it underlies our existence, it is the air we breathe.
N—— is charming, and thought we were quarrelling, and therefore intervened on his side!