Now what is to be done next?--I would like to go and confide in the Duchesse, and tell her that I believe I have fallen in love with my secretary, who won't look at me, and ask her advice--but that I fear with all her broad-minded charity, her class prejudice is too strong to make her really sympathetic. Her French mind of the _Ancien Régime_ could not contemplate a Thormonde--son of Anne de Mont-Anbin--falling in love with an insignificant Miss Sharp who brings bandages to the Courville hospital! These thoughts tormented me so all yesterday that I was quite feverish by the evening--and Burton wore an air of thorough disapproval. A rain shower came on too, and I could not go up on the terrace for the sunset. I would like to have taken asperines and gone to sleep, when night came--but I resisted the temptation, telling myself that to-morrow she would come again. I am dawdling over this last chapter on purpose--and I have re-read the former ones and decided to rewrite one or two, but at best I cannot spread this out over more than six weeks, I fear, and then what excuse can I have for keeping her? I feel that she would not stay just to answer a few letters a day, and do the accounts and pay the bills with Burton. I feel more desperately miserable than I have felt since last year--And I suppose that according to her theory, I have to learn a lesson. It seems if I search, as she said one must do without vanity, that the lesson is to conquer emotion, and be serene when everything which I desire is out of reach. * * * * * _Saturday Night:_ To-day has been one of utter disaster and it began fairly well. Miss Sharp turned up at eleven as I shut my journal. I had sent to the station to meet her this time--She brought all the work she had taken away with her on Thursday, quite in order--and her face wore the usual mask. I wonder if I had not ever seen her without her glasses if I should have realized now that she is very pretty--I can see her prettiness even with them on--her nose is so exquisitely fine, and the mouth a Cupid's bow really--if one can imagine a Cupid's bow very firm. I am sure if she were dressed as Odette, or Alice, or Coralie, she would be lovely. This morning when she first came I began thinking of this and of how I should like to give her better things than any of the fluffies have ever had--how I would like her to have some sapphire bangles for those little wrists and a great string of pearls round that little throat--my mother's pearls--and perhaps big pearls in those shell ears--And how I would like to take her hair down and brush it out, and let it curl as it wanted to--and then bury my face in it--those stiff twists must take heaps of hair to make.--But why am I writing all this when the reality is further off than ever, and indeed has become an impossibility I fear.