If you know enough grammar to talk comprehensibly, you know enough to write comprehensibly, and you need not trouble about anything else; in fact, you ought not to do so, and you must not. Formality in a diary is a mistake. Write as you think, as you speak, and it may be given to you to produce literature. But if while you are writing you remember that there is such a thing as literature, you will assuredly never produce literature. This does not mean that you are entitled to write anyhow, without thought and without effort. Not a bit. Good diaries are not achieved thus. Although you may and should ignore the preoccupations of what I will call, sarcastically, ‘literary composition,’ you must have always before you the ideal of effectively getting your thought on to the paper. You would, sooner or later, _say_ your thought effectively, but in writing it down some travail is needed to imagine what the perhaps unstudied spoken words would be. And also, the memory must be fully and honestly exercised to recall the scene or the incident described. By carelessness you run the risk of ‘leaving out the interesting part.’ By being conscientious you ensure that the maximum of interest is attained. Lastly, it is necessary to conquer the human objection to hard labour of any sort. It is not a paradox to assert that man often dislikes the work which he likes. For myself, every day anew, I hate to start work. You may end your day with the full knowledge that you have had experiences that day worthy to go into the diary, which experiences remain in your mind obstinately. And yet you hate to open the diary, and even when you have opened it you hate to put your back into the business of writing. You are tempted to write without reflection, without order, and too briefly. To resist the temptation to be slack and casual and second-rate involves constant effort. Diary-keeping should be a pastime, but properly done it is also a task--like many other pastimes. I have kept a diary for over twenty-one years, and I know a little about it. I know more than a little about the remorse--alas, futile!--which follows negligence. In diary-keeping negligence cannot be repaired. That which is gone is gone beyond return. A DANGEROUS LECTURE TO A YOUNG WOMAN A DANGEROUS LECTURE TO A YOUNG WOMAN I IT was at a war-charity sale, in a hot, crowded public room of a fashionable hotel, amid the humorous bellowings of an amateur auctioneer and the guffaws of amused bidders, that this thing happened to me. A young woman was passing, and, as she passed, she looked and stopped, and abruptly charged me with being myself. I admitted the undeniable. ‘I hope you’ll excuse me,’ she said. ‘I’ve read all your books.’ ‘The usual amiable chatter,’ I thought, and made aloud my usual, stilted, self-conscious reply to such a conversational opening: ‘You must have worked very hard.’