It was not, however, because of her physical weakness that she stopped writing in the late summer of 1922. The power of her spirit to triumph over the frailty of her body had been proved over and over again. She stopped writing deliberately, not under compulsion. She felt that her whole attitude to life needed to be renewed, and she determined that she would write no more until it had been renewed. Perhaps an idea of the way her mind—or rather her whole being—was moving, may be gleaned from some extracts from her journal. At first, her dissatisfaction with her work took shape in a feeling that she was not exerting the whole of her powers or expressing the whole of her knowledge in her writings. As early as July 1921, when she was still engaged on the last of the stories for “The Garden Party,” she wrote: July 1921. I finished _Mr. and Mrs. Dove_ yesterday. I am not altogether pleased with it. It’s a little bit made up. It’s not inevitable. I meant to imply that those two may not be happy together—that that is the kind of reason for which a young girl marries. But have I done so? I don’t think so. Besides it’s not _strong_ enough. I want to be nearer—far nearer than that. I want to use all my force, even when I am taking a fine line. And I have a sneaking notion that I have, at the end, used the doves _unwarrantably_. Tu sais ce que je veux dire. I used them to round off something—didn’t I? Is that quite my game? No, it’s not. It’s not quite the kind of truth I’m after. Now for _Susannah_. All must be _deeply felt_. And a few days later she wrote: July 23. Finished _An Ideal Family_ yesterday. It seems to me better than the _Doves_, but still it’s not good enough. I worked at it hard enough, God knows, and yet I didn’t get the deepest truth out of the idea, even once. What is this feeling? I feel again that this kind of knowledge is too easy for me; it’s even a kind of trickery. I know so much more. It looks and smells like a story, but I wouldn’t buy it. I don’t want to possess it—to live with it. _No._ Once I have written two more, I shall tackle something different—a long story—_At the Bay_, with more _difficult_ relationships. That’s the whole problem. Yet a little later her vision of the cause of her own dissatisfaction deepened, and she began to define it in terms—of the insufficient clarity of her own spirit, and of the incompleteness of her inward life—which were to become more and more familiar.