This man is my devoted friend!... And truth to tell I get on with him better than I do with most people. I like his gamey flavour, his utter absence of self-consciousness, and his doggy loyalty to myself—his weaker brother. He may be depraved in his habits, coarse in his language, boorish in his manners, ludicrous in the wrongness of all his views. But I like him just because he is so hopeless. I get on with him because it is so impossible to reclaim him—my missionary spirit is not intrigued. If he only dabbled in vice (for an experiment), if he had pale, watery ideas about current literature—if—to use his own favourite epithet—he were genteel, I should quarrel.
October 30.
Having developed a passion for a piece of sculpture by R. Boeltzig called the Reifenwerferin—the most beautiful figure of a woman. I am already devoted to Rodin's "Kiss" and have a photo of it framed in my bedroom. Have written to Bruciani's.
I suspect that my growing appreciation of the plastic art is with me only distilled sensuality. I enjoy my morning bath for the same reason. My bath is a daily baptism. I revel in the pleasure of the pain of the cold water. I whistle gleefully because I am clean and cool and nude early in the morning with the sun still low, before the day has been stained by clothes, dirt, pain, exasperation, death.... How I love myself as I rub myself down!—the cool, pink skin—I could eat it! I want to be all day in a cold bath to enjoy the pain of mortifying the flesh—it is so beautiful, so soft, so inscrutable—if I cut out chunks of it, it would only bleed.
November 8.
The other morning R—— said hyperbolically that he hadn't slept all night for fear that, before he had time to put an arresting hand on my shoulder and say "Don't," I might have gone and become "Entangled." ...
... No, I'm as firm as a rock, my dear. But in imagination the affair was continued as follows,—
She: "I am fond of you, you know."
He: "I wish you wouldn't say these things to me—they're quite embarrassing."
She: "Oh! my dear, I'm not serious, you know—you're such a vain young man."