1912
January 21.
Am at last beginning to get more content with the work at the Museum, so that I muse on Bernard Shaw's saying, "Get what you like or you'll grow to like what you get." I have a terrible suspicion that the security of tenure here is like the lion's den in the fable—Nulla vestiga retrorsum. Of course I am wonderfully proud of being at the Museum, although I am disappointed and write as if I were quite blasé.
January 25.
I should be disappointed if at the end of my career (if I live to see it through) I do not win the F.R.S. I should very much like it.... My nature is very mixed—ambitious above all things and yet soon giddy with the audacity of my aspirations. The B.M. and my colleagues make me feel most inferior in fact, but in theory—in the secrecy of my own bedchamber—I feel that there are few men there my equal.
April 26.
Down with influenza. A boarding-house with the 'flue!
May 8.
Went home to recuperate, a beef jelly in one pocket and sal volatile in the other. On arrival, my blanched appearance frightened Mother and the others, so went to bed at once. "Fate's a fiddler, life's a dance."
May 12.