This evening went to the Library and read about her in Mathilde Blind's introductory essay to her Journal. I am simply astounded. It would be difficult in all the world's history to discover any two persons with temperaments so alike. She is the "very spit of me "! I devoured Mathilde Blind's pages more and more astonished. We are identical! Oh, Marie Bashkirtseff! how we should have hated one another! She feels as I feel. We have the same self-absorption, the same vanity and corroding ambition. She is impressionable, volatile, passionate—ill! So am I. Her journal is my journal. All mine is stale reading now. She has written down all my thoughts and forestalled me! Already I have found some heart-rending parallels. To think I am only a replica: how humiliating for a human being to find himself merely a duplicate of another. Is there anything in the transmigration of souls? She died in 1886. I was born in 1889.
October 15.
A man is always looking at himself in the mirror if for no other reason than to tie his tie and brush his hair. What does he think of his face? He must have private opinions. But it is usually considered a little out of taste to entertain opinions about one's personal appearance.
As for myself, some mirrors do me down pretty well, others depress me! I am bound to confess I am biassed in favour of the friendly mirror. I am not handsome, but I look interesting—I hope distinguished. My eyes are deep-set ... but my worst moments are when the barber combs my hair right down over my forehead, or when I see a really handsome man in Hyde Park. Such occasions direct my gaze reflexly, and doubt like a thief in the night forces the back door!
To-day, M—— sent me dancing mad by suggesting that I copied R—— in my manner of speech and opinions.
Now R—— has a damned pervasive way of conducting himself—for all the world as if he were a high official of the Foreign Office. I, on the contrary, am shy, self-conscious, easily overlooked, and this makes me writhe. As we are inseparable friends—everybody assumes that I am his tacky-lacky, a kind of appoggiatura to his big note. He, they suppose, is my guide, philosopher, and Great Maecenas—Oxford befriending the proletariat. The thought of it makes me sick—that any one should believe I imbibe his ideas, echo his conceits, and even ape his gestures and manner of voice.
"Lost yourself?" inquired a despicable creature the other morning as I came out of R——'s room after finding him out. I could have shot him dead! ... As for —— more than one person thinks that he alone is the brilliant author until at last he himself has got into the way of thinking it.
"It makes me hate you like mad," I said to him to-day. "How can I confront these people with the naked truth?" R—— chuckled complacently.
"If I deny your alleged supremacy, as I did this morning, or if suddenly, in a fit of spleen, I'm induced to declare that I loathe you (as I sometimes do)"—(more chuckles) "that your breath stinks, your eyes bulge, that you have swollen jugulars and a platter face: they will think I am either jealous or insincere.... To be your Echo tho'!—my God!" I spat. We then grinned at one another, and I, being bored, went to the lavatory and read the newspaper secure from interruption.