Perhaps Mr. Wilson did not know much foreign literature. But he wanted to; or he would not have those translations of Ibsen and Björnsen. German poetry marched and sang and did all sorts of things. Anyhow it was wonderful about English--but if books were written like that, sitting down and doing it cleverly and knowing just what you were doing and just how somebody else had done it, there was something wrong, some mannish cleverness that was only half right. To write books, knowing all about style would be to become like a man. Women who wrote books and learned these things would be absurd and would make men absurd. There was something wrong. It was in all those books upstairs. "Good stuff" was wrong, a clever trick, not worth doing. And yet everybody seemed to want to write. The rest of the day--secret and wonderful. Sitting about, taken for one of the Wilson kind of people, someone who was writing or going to write, by the two Scotch professors; sitting about listening to their quiet easy eager unconcerned talk, seeing them "all round" as Mr. Wilson saw them, the limits of professorship and teaching, the silly net and trick of examinations, their simplicity and their helplessness; playing the lovely accompaniment like quiet waves, of Schubert's Ave Maria, the sudden, jolly, sentimental voice of Professor Ewings, his nice attentions ... if it had been Wimpole Street or anywhere in society he would not have seen me.... It would be wrong to try and write just because Mr. Wilson had said one ought.... The reasons he had given for writing were the wrong ones ... but it would be impossible to go down again without doing some writing.... Impossible not to go down again.... They knew one was "different"; and liked it and thought it a good thing; a sort of distinction. No one had thought that before. It made them a home and a refuge. The only refuge there was except being by oneself ... only their kind of difference was not the same. They thought nearly everyone "futile" and "dull"--everyone who did not see things in their way was that. Presently they would find that one was not different in the same way. He had spoken of people who grow "dull" as you get to know them. Awful ... perhaps already, he meant---- * * * * * "It's all very well ... people read Matthew Arnold's simple profundities; er--simple profundities; and learn his little trick; and go _about_--hcna, hcna,--arm in arm with this swell ... hcna ... _puffing_ with illumination. All about _nothing_. It's all, my dear Miss Henderson, about absolutely nothing." * * * * *