...... But I find my daily round at Wimpole Street dull. No, not dull; wrong in some way. I did not choose it; I was forced into it. I chose it; there was something there; but it has gone. If it had not gone I should never have found other things. “But you would have found something else my child.” No. I am glad it has gone. I see now what I have escaped. “But you would have developed differently and not got out of touch. People don’t if they are always together.” But that is just the dreadful thing.... Cléo de Mérode going back sometimes, with just one woman friend, to the little cabarets.... Intense sympathy with that means that one is a sort of adventuress ... the Queen can never ride on an omnibus. Why does being free give a feeling of meanness? Being able to begin all over again, always unknown, at any moment; feeling a sort of pity and contempt for the people who can’t; and then being happy and forgetting them. But there is pain all round it that they never know. It is only by the pain of remaining free that one can have the whole world round one all the time.... But it disappears.... No, just at the moment you are most sure that everything is over for ever, it comes again, and you cannot believe it ever disappeared. But with the little feeling of meanness; towards the people you have left and towards the new people. If you have ever failed anybody, you have no right to speak to anyone else. All these years I ought never to have spoken to anybody. “If I have shrunk unequal from one contest the joy I find in all the rest becomes mean and cowardly. I should hate myself if I then made my other friends my asylum.” Emerson would have hated me. But he thinks evil people are necessary. How is one to know whether one is really evil? Suppose one is. The Catholics believe that even the people in hell have a little relaxation now and again. Lewes said it is the relief from pain that gives you the illusion of bliss. It was cruel when she was dying; but if it is true where is the difference? Perhaps in being mean enough to take relief you don’t deserve. Can anyone be thoroughly happy and thoroughly evil? Botheration. Some clue had been missed. There was something incomplete in the thought that had come just now and seemed so convincing. She turned back and faced the self that had said one ought to meet everything in life with one’s eyes on the sky. It had flashed in and out, between her thoughts. Now it seemed alien. Other thoughts were coming up, the thoughts and calculations she had not meant to make, but they rushed forward, and there was something extraordinary behind them, something that was part of the sky, of her own particular sky as she knew it. She had the right to make them, having been driven away from turning them into social charm for the dining-room. Once more she turned busily to the sky, thrusting back her thoughts; but it was just the flat sky of everyday, part of London; with nothing particular to say.