A little better and more cheerful: altho' my impregnable colon still holds out.
It would be nice if a physician from London one of these days were to gallop up hotspur, tether his horse to the gate post and dash in waving a reprieve—the discovery of a cure!
... I was in an impish mood and said: "Oh! dear, I'm full of misery."
"Don't be silly," she said, "so am I."
November 17.
E—— has been telling me some of her emotions during and after her fateful visit to my Doctor just before our marriage. He did not spare her and even estimated the length of my life after I had once taken to my bed—about 12 months. I remember his consulting room so well—all its furniture and the photograph of Madam Blavatsky over the door, and I picture her to myself sitting opposite to him in a sullen silence listening to the whole lugubrious story. Then she said at last: "All this won't make any difference to me." She went home to her mother in a dream, along the streets I have followed so often. I can follow all her footsteps in imagination and keep on retracing them. It hurts, but I do so because it seems to make her some amends for my being childishly unconscious at the time. Poor darling woman—if only I had known! My instinct was right—I felt in my bones it was wrong to marry, yet here was M—— urging me on. "You marry," her mother said to her, "I'll stand by you," which was right royal of her. There followed some trying months of married life with this white hot secret in her bosom as a barricade to perfect intimacy; me she saw always under this cloud of crude disgusting pathos making her say a hundred times to herself: "He doesn't know;" then Zeppelin raids and a few symptoms began to grow obvious, until what before she had to take on trust from the Doctor came diabolically true before her eyes. Thank God that's all over at last. I know her now for all she is worth—her loyalty and devotion, her courage and strength. If only I had something to give her in return! something more than the dregs of a life and a constitutional pessimism. I greatly desire to make some sacrifice, but I am so poor these days, so very much a pauper on her charity, there is no sacrifice I can make. Even my life would scarcely be a sacrifice in the circumstances—it is hard not to be able to give when one wants to give.
November 20.
In the doldrums. Tired of this damnable far niente,—I am being gently smothered under a mountain of feathers. I should like to engage upon some cold, hard, glittering intellectualism.
"I want to read Kant," I said. The Baby slept, E—— was sewing and N—— writing letters. I leaned back in my armchair beside the bookshelf and began to read out the titles of my books in a loud voice.
"My dear!" E—— said.