I wrote it in an immense hurry before leaving the hotel this morning. A sudden impulse seized me while I was having breakfast; it was 7.30; my train from Haslemere was due to leave at 8.15; and Taplow's Ford was already shaking its hoary sides in the yard. I scribbled it out in pencil and gave it to the maid to take up to June along with the morning cup of tea. But the extraordinary part of it is that I can't very well remember what I wrote. The general trend, I imagine, was to give June the tip that it wouldn't be any use her expecting _him_ to do the proposing; but I hope to God I didn't put it quite so crudely as that. Probably I didn't; perhaps it was a marvel of tactful insinuation. Anyhow, it's done now, and can't be helped. Helen is coming here to tea this afternoon; I asked her two days ago, thinking it would be a change for her if she felt too desperate. Now I rather wish I hadn't asked her. I am altogether out of the mood for skating on thin ice. It is bound to be difficult, and Heaven alone knows what we shall talk about. I shan't--I can't--tell her anything about Terry and June.... VI 11 _P.M._ I am alone now; Roebuck has gone to bed; and there is a cool south wind blowing in amongst my papers. The day has passed most wonderfully well, and I am very happy. Helen came, and she wasn't desperate at all. She was calm--calm as if she were ten years older than when I saw her last. Or ten years younger.... I hardly know which; I only know that a touch of her old queer fascination has come back to her, making her wonderful again. Perhaps the two days that have passed since our talk on the End House lawn have really been ten years--long enough for her soul to escape from turmoil. There was no need for me not to mention Terry. She mentioned him herself, but in such an odd way--as if, so it seemed to me, she were very old and he a long while dead. She gossiped about him, almost; anything, everything reminded her of him. When, for instance, I talked of the new house, she said: "Oh, yes, that's in the architect's hands now. There's no more for me to do. No more scrambling up hills with Terry." Quietly--half-mockingly--like _that_! "Not that I ever liked hills," she went on. "I hated them. But Terry was never happy except when he was consuming vast quantities of energy. If it wasn't physical energy, then it was mental, and it wasn't mental, then it was moral.... Didn't you ever notice that?" I had noticed it. And then she went on again: "You ought to have seen him years ago at those bacteriology lectures. He didn't _teach_ bacteriology--he _preached_ it. And it was the same sort of thing with the hills--he didn't _climb_ them; he _conquered_ them." She talked about him effortlessly, as if she were somehow drifting in a strong and peaceful tide. When I put a question about Severn she had to fight the tide while she gave a slow and reluctant answer.... Geoffrey, she said, was very busy and perfectly the same.