Well, I must confess I have had an idle day—God knows why. All was to be written, but I just didn’t write it. I thought I would, but I felt tired after tea, and rested instead. Is it good or bad in me to behave so? I have a sense of guilt, but at the same time I know that to rest is the very best thing I can do. And for some reason there is a kind of booming in my head—which is horrid. But marks of earthly degradation still pursue me. I am not crystal clear. Above all else, I do still lack application. It’s not right. There is so much to do, and I do so little. Look at the stories that wait and wait, just at the threshold. Why don’t I let them in? And their place would be taken by others who are lurking beyond, just out there—waiting for the chance. Next day. Yet take this morning, for instance. I don’t want to write anything. It’s grey; it’s heavy and dull. And short stories seem unreal, and not worth doing. I don’t want to write? I want to _live_. What does one mean by that? It’s not too easy to say. But there you are! Aug. 21. All this that I write, all that I am, is on the border of the sea. It’s a kind of playing. I want to put all my force behind it, but somehow I _cannot_. And again in the autumn of the year her incessant effort towards an inward purity—who but she would have dreamed that she lacked it?—as a condition of soul essential to writing as she purposed to write, becomes still more manifest. Oct. 16. Another radiant day. J. is typing my last story, _The Garden Party_, which I finished on my birthday. It took me nearly a month to ‘recover’ from _At the Bay_. I made at least four false starts. But I could not get away from the sound of the sea and Beryl fanning her hair at the window. These things would not _die down_. But now I am not at all sure about that story. It seems to me it is a little ‘wispy’—not what it might have been. The _G. P._ is better. But that is not _good enough_, either.... The last few days, what one notices more than anything is the blue. Blue sky, blue mountains—all is a heavenly blueness! And clouds of all kinds—wings, soft white clouds, almost hard little golden islands, great mock-mountains. The gold deepens on the slopes. In fact, in sober fact, it is perfection. But the late evening is the time of times. Then, with that unearthly beauty before one, it is not hard to realize how far one has to go. To write something that will be worthy of that rising moon, that pale light. To be ‘simple’ enough as one would be simple before God.