Can one acquire, by any effort of the mind, this kind of patience?  I do not think one can.  The most that one can do is to behave as far as possible like one playing a heavy part upon the stage, to say with trembling lips that one has hope, when the sick mind beneath cries out that there is none.

Perhaps one can practise a sort of indifference, and hope that advancing years may still the beating heart and numb the throbbing nerve.  But I do not even desire to live life on these terms.  The one great article of my creed has been that one ought not to lose zest and spirit, or acquiesce slothfully in comfortable and material conditions, but that life ought to be full of perception and emotion.  Here again lies my mistake; that it has not been perception or emotion that I have practised, but the art of expressing what I have perceived and felt.  Of course, I wish with all my heart and soul that it were otherwise; but it seems that I have drifted so far into these tepid, sun-warmed shallows, the shallows of egoism and self-centred absorption, that there is no possibility of my finding my way again to the wholesome brine, to the fresh movement of the leaping wave.  I am like one of those who lingered so long in the enchanted isle of Circe, listening luxuriously to the melting cadences of her magic song, that I have lost all hope of extricating myself from the spell.  The old free days, when the heart beat light, and the breeze blew keen against my brow, have become only a memory of delights, just enabling me to speak deftly and artfully of the strong joys which I have forfeited.

February 24, 1889.

I have been away for some days, paying a visit to an old friend, a bachelor clergyman living in the country.  The only other occupant of the house, a comfortable vicarage, is his curate.  I am better—­ ashamed almost to think how much better—­for the change.  It is partly the new place, the new surroundings, the new minds, no doubt.  But it is also the change of atmosphere.  At home I am surrounded by sympathy and compassion; however unobtrusive they are, I feel that they are there.  I feel that trivial things, words, actions, looks are noted, commented upon, held to be significant.  If I am silent, I must be depressed; if I talk and smile, I am making an effort to overcome my depression.  It sounds unloving and ungracious to resent this:  but I don’t undervalue the care and tenderness that cause it; at the same time it adds to the strain by imposing upon me a sort of vigilance, a constant effort to behave normally.  It is infinitely and deeply touching to feel love all about me; but in such a state of mind as mine, one is shy of emotion, one dreads it, one shuns it.  I suppose it argues a want of simplicity, of perfect manfulness, to feel this; but few or no women can instinctively feel the difference.  In a real and deep affliction, one that could be frankly confessed, the more affection and sympathy that one can have the better; it is the one thing that sustains.  But my unhappiness is not a real thing altogether, not a frank thing; the best medicine for it is to think as little about it; the only help one desires is the evidence that one does not need sympathy; and sympathy only turns one’s thoughts inwards, and makes one feel that one is forlorn and desolate, when the only hope is to feel neither.