"Her wish:
"'Farewell dear brother, Mother, sisters,
My life was passed in love for thee.
Mourn not for me nor sorrow take
But love my husband for my sake
Until the call comes home to thee,
Live thou in peace and harmony.'"
Again:
"A day of remembrance sad to recall
But still in my heart he is loved best of all
No matter how I think of him—his name I oft recall;
There is nothing left to answer me but his photo on the wall."
Or:
"One year has passed since that sad day,
When one we loved was called away.
God took her home; it was His will,
Forget her?—No, we never will."
These piteous screeds fill me with loving-kindness and with contempt alternately in a pendulum-like rhythm. What is the truth about them? Is the grief of these people as mean and ridiculous as their rhymes? Or is it a pitiful inarticulateness? Or is it merely vulgar advertisement of their sorrow? Or does it signify a passionate intention never to forget?—or a fear of forgetting, the rhymes being used as a fillip to the memory? Or—most miserable of all—is it just a custom, and one followed in order to appear respectable in others' eyes? Are they poor souls? or contemptible fools?
September 14.
There is a ridiculous Cocker spaniel at the house where we are staying. He must have had a love affair and been jilted, or else he's a sort of village idiot. The landlady says he's not so silly as he looks—but he looks very silly: he languishes sentimentally, and when we laugh at him he looks "hurt." To-day we took him up on the Down and it seemed to brighten him up. Really, he is sane enough, with plenty of commonsense and good manners. But he is kept at home in the garden so much, lolling about all day, that as E—— said, having nothing to do, he falls in love.
The Saturday Review writes: The effect of the "Brides and the Bath" Case on people with any trace of nice feeling is perhaps not particularly mischievous, tho' the thing is repulsive and hateful to them.... To gloat over the details of repulsive horrors, simply from motives of curiosity—this is bad and degrading.
What a lot of repulsive things the nice refined people who read the Saturday Review must find in the world just now. For example the War. "Simply from motives of curiosity." Why certainly, no other than these, concerning one of the most remarkable murders in the annals of crime. And murders anyhow are damned interesting—which the Saturday Review isn't.