I would not show myself of a churlish mind; the day is certainly fine, as fine a day as you could be compelled to sit out in. A week has passed since I lent myself to be a spectacle of domestic tyranny and modern science, and I hasten to announce that although I want to eat more and to go to bed earlier I am not at all better. I have let the week go by without taking any notice of it in this journal under the impression that it was not worth the pains, as they say in France. It was doubtless a wonderful week in nature, but which of the fifty-two is not? and being certain that my fountain pen would be anything but a source of amiability, I left it in the house. Moreover, there is something not quite proper, one finds, in confiding an experience of personal discomfort, undergone with the object of improving one’s health, to the printed page; it is akin to lending one’s maladies to an advertiser of patent medicines, and tends to give light literature too much the character of a human document. Also, to look back upon, the late week holds little but magnificent resolution and the sensation of cold feet. All that need be said about it is that I have at last arrived at the end of it, full of fortitude and resignation. I am not at all better, but I am resigned and prepared to go on, if it is required of me, and it seems likely to be. In fact it appears to have occurred to nobody but myself that there was anything experimental about this period. The whole summer is to be the experiment, I am told, as often as if they were addressing the meanest intelligence, which is not the case. My sensibilities no doubt are becoming slightly blunted. A whole week without a roof over one’s head except at night would naturally have that tendency. I find that I am no longer a prey to the desire to go in and look at something in the last number of _The Studio_, and the more subtly tormented of modern novelties fails to hold my attention for more than half-an-hour at a time. The spirit in my feet that would carry me indoors has still to be bound down, but it has grown vague and purposeless and might lead me anywhere, even to the kitchen to see if the cook is keeping his saucepans clean, the most detestable responsibility of my life. Now that I am a close prisoner outside the house, by the way, it shall be delegated to Thisbe. That is no more than right.