So I have got to know Elspeth after all. I never spent such a night in my life. She beats every girl I have ever met in every possible way--she's prettier, more talkative, more seductive, more lovable, more--more everything. She wanted to know all about me and told me all her life history: we fixed up all sorts of meetings and grew more and more pleased with each other as the evening went on. She is the best dancer I ever struck and likes my style of dancing better than the more fantastic and modern methods of Conyngham, against whom she seems to harbour a pretty active dislike, to my great astonishment. I wonder what's happened. They were as thick as thieves all last year. The next day I met her again for a few minutes. I tramped up and down Milsom Street until I saw her. I took Ruth to the pantomime at Bristol in the afternoon and to _Gypsy Love_ in Bath at night. Elspeth was also there. Yesterday I went to the rink with Ruth and saw Elspeth again, and this afternoon I managed to get away from all my crowd and have tea with Elspeth at the rink: so ends the year 1912. I seem to be getting fonder of the other sex and not to be quite so nervous and hoydenish in their presence as I used to be a year ago. Bath has educated me a good deal. I am much more the normal man of society than I ever thought I was going to be. _January 1, 1913_ Life has moved since yesterday. To-night was the Lansdown Cricket Club Ball. I divided my programme equally between Ruth and Elspeth. Elspeth was looking wonderful in a filmy sort of pink strawberry frock. Everything went quite normally and gaily until number fifteen, after which Elspeth and I found a sitting-out room in inky darkness. Suddenly she leant over, my arms were about her neck, we kissed ... and now I live in a different world. Even now I can't believe it. It seems impossible that she should love me. Yet she has promised to marry me. I never dreamt such luck could be mine. She seemed so far above me, so obviously a match for the best of men and not for a poor drudge of a schoolmaster. She says that for a whole year she has been thinking about me and meant to marry me all along, only she was afraid I was already engaged or about to be. We sat out all the rest of the dances. I am living on air. I am much too cheerful and can't sleep at all. I want to go out and shout my good fortune to the skies. What are we going to live on I wonder? What will my people or hers say about it? I only know that nothing will induce me to give her up. I seem to be a quite different person from what I was this time yesterday. I know that then I never thought that I should have the ghost of a chance of even knowing Elspeth well, and now she is willing and anxious to live with me for the rest of my life. _January 23, 1913_