It's raining and I feel lonely and cold and forsaken. Pray for me. How well I know that wraith-like, disembodied feeling; it has been mine all last, this week. One lay in bed and felt like a shell and wept and weeping made one cough and summer was over. I asked my doctor the very question, “What would one do if one had to cope with life,” and he replied “Why, you'd be in an institution and paid for by the state.” So there is one horror spared.

Why these young men should lean and lean over the decomposing vapours of poor Jules Laforgue is inexplicable…. It only makes one feel how one adores English prose, how to be a writer—is everything. I do believe that the time has come for a ‘new word’ but I imagine the new

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word will not be spoken easily. People have never explored the lovely medium of prose. It is a hidden country still—I feel that so profoundly.

Monday. The weather has ‘got me’ completely; I am ill again. I have coughed so much that I feel like a living rattle. There's nothing to be done. Why won't the summer come back? What has happened to it? One must drug oneself deeply, deeply with work and try to forget.

Forgive me—I can't write—I feel numb with despair—and only want to creep away somewhere and weep and weep—