So far as I can see, I have come now to the end of this record. The future seems pretty well decided; Severn will write his books on Robert Walpole and Pontius Pilate and become as famous in literature as in everything else that he has ever touched; Terry will marry June and live happily ever after. It's an absurd phrase, in nine contexts out of ten, but I really do think it's likely to be true of those two. They're such clear-hearted people; marriage will be so tremendously simple to them. Terry will never think of any woman but June, and June will never think of any man but Terry. They'll live in a bungalow in some blazing Australian suburb, and probably they'll have lots of children--far more than Terry could possibly afford on his own income. If he gets the chance, and I daresay he will, he'll do valuable but not exactly epoch-making work as a bacteriologist. A well-known scientist told me the other day that in his opinion the importance of the Karelsky discoveries had been greatly over-rated. "They're valuable," he said, "but they're only a beginning, and the world's been treating them as if they were the end...." Perhaps Terry will carry them further on from that beginning. But whatever he does, I'm quite certain that his name will never echo across the world. I shall never earn stray guineas by writing 'The Great Man As I Knew Him' articles in the gossipy press. Two are still left whose future is beyond prophecy. There's Helen.... What _will_ happen to her? When she hears the news about June and Terry, will she still cling to that eager, scornful belief in her own power over him? Will she keep her word for ever--will she stay with Severn as in duty bound, not to him, but to Terry? Is it even possible that in time there may grow in her some scrap of affection for the author of the best short book on Disraeli that has ever been written? Frankly, I like Severn, and I find it tremendously hard to understand how anybody else can help liking him. Yet Helen doesn't.... Perhaps, after all, they are incompatibles whom nothing, neither time nor calamity, can bring together. And then ... Mizzi.... Strange, perhaps, that I should be thinking of her now, should see her so clearly in my mind. She writes to me from time to time, and always with some mention of Terry; her last letter came two months ago. The hotel, I gather, proceeds from strength to strength, and I shouldn't be at all surprised to hear that, having exhausted all the European languages, she's now tackling Aramaic or Siamese.... One thing I've quite decided; I shall go to Vienna this year and take this manuscript for her to read.