7 July 1913 – 13 July 1913

I get thro' each day with the utmost difficulty. I have to wrestle with every minute. Each hour is a conquest. The three quarters of an hour at lunch comes as a Godsend. I look forward to it all the morning, I enter into it with joyful relief with no thought of the dreadful moment impending when I must return and re-enter my room. By being wise like this, I manage to husband my spirits and am relatively cheerful for one hour in the middle of each difficult day.

Several times I have gone to bed and hoped I should never wake up. Life grows daily more impossible. To-day I put a slide underneath the microscope and looked at it. It was like looking at something thro' the wrong end of a telescope. I sat with eye glued to the ocular, so as to keep up a pretence of work in case some one came in. My mind was occupied with quite different affairs. If one is pondering on Life and Death, it is a terrible task to have to study Mites.

Am doing no work at all.... I sit motionless in my chair and beat the devil's tattoo with my thumbs and think, think, think in the same horrible circle hour after hour. I am unable to work. I haven't the courage to. I've lost my nerve. At five I return "home" to the Boarding-house and get more desperate. Two old maids sat down to dinner to-night, one German youth (a lascivious, ranting, brainless creature), a lady typist (who takes drugs they say), a dipsomaniac (who has monthly bouts--H---- carried him upstairs and put him to bed the other night), two invertebrate violinists who play in the Covent Garden Orchestra, a colonial lady engaged in a bedroom intrigue with a man who sits at my table. What are these people to me? I hate them all. They know it and are offended. After dinner, put on my cap and rushed out anywhere to escape. Walked to the end of the street, not knowing where I was going or what doing. Stopped and stared with fixed eyes at the traffic in Kensington Road, undetermined what to do with myself and unable to make up my mind (volitional paralysis). Turned round, walked home, and went straight to bed 9 p.m., anxiously looking forward to to-morrow evening when I go to see her again, but at the same time wondering how on earth I am to get through to-morrow's round before the evening comes.... This is a hand-to-mouth existence. My own inner life is scorching up all outside interests. Zoology appears as a curious thing in a Bagdad bazaar. I sit in my room at the B.M. and play with it; I let it trickle thro' my fingers and roll away like a child playing with quicksilver.

Over to the flat. She was looking beautiful in a black dress, with a white silk blouse, and a Byron collar, negligently open in front as if a button had come out. She said I varied: sometimes I went up in her estimation, sometimes down; once I went down very low. I understood her to say I was now UP! Alleluia!