We came back yesterday, and I feel absolutely lost without B. G. and Seymour, who have both left. They do make a gap, for we three understood each other, and we ladled out sympathy to each other when life became too black. And now I am alone, in a hornets’ nest of rabid footballers. At the moment I am reading Gogol’s _Dead Souls._ His word-pictures are superb: better than Ruskin’s or Carlyle’s, and his style is so terse and clean-cut, at least it is in the translation, but it shines through that. I am an absolute slave. I shall keep this book for ever by me if I have enough cash to buy it with. He is wonderful. He is at his best, I think, in description; I have met nothing like it. Almost he ousts Carlyle; not quite, though. He is a poet through and through. 29 January. But surely this is most beautiful: The trills of a lark fall drop by drop down an unseen aery ladder, and the calls of the cranes, floating by in a long string, like the ringing notes of silver bugles, resound in the void of melodiously vibrating ether. He is a poet: and his book is in very truth a poem. It is Gogol. 30 January. Am reading Winston Churchill’s biography of his father, which is very wonderful. I hardly remember B. G. as having existed now. That doesn’t mean to say that I don’t answer his letters, but life goes on much the same. Did I say that I had become the budding author at home? No, I think not. I have written in all three things, so that I am hailed as a Napoleon of literature. Such is fame. I only wish I deserved these eulogies, and must set seriously to work soon. Mrs. Conder most of all seems impressed. Talks at tea of nothing but where she can take me to get “copy”--which means Brighton, I suppose; not that horrid things don’t happen there, though. But she is the limit. Since Conder died she has blossomed. At least, when he was alive, one could make allowances for her, because he was so foul, but now there is nothing to say. She is so _gay_, so _devilish gay!_ But all this is very untrue, unkind and ungrateful. In all she has given me £5 in tips, and a cookery book for Boy Scouts. 17 February. In a moment of rash exuberance I bought a cigarette-holder about eight inches long. Have been smoking it all the afternoon. Caused quite a sensation in the middle-class atmosphere of the tea shop _chez_ Beryl. Am delivering an oration to the Arts Society on Japanese Art. I am going to speak it and not read it, which is bravery carried to foolhardiness. But it is good to get a little practice in speaking. 22 February.