November 14
Before going over tonight bought London Opinion deliberately in order to find a joke or better still some cynicism about women to fire off at her. Rehearsed one joke, one witticism from Oscar Wilde, and one personal anecdote (the latter for the most part false), none of which came off, though I succeeded in carrying off a nonchalant or even jaunty bearing.
“Don’t you ever swear?” I asked. “It’s a good thing you know, swearing is like pimples, better to come out, cleanses the moral system. The person who controls himself must have lots of terrible oaths circulating in his blood.”
“Swearing is not the only remedy.”
“I suppose you prefer the gilded pill of a curate’s sermon: I prefer pimples to pills.”
Is it a wonder she does not love me?
I wonder why I paint myself in such horrid colours—why have I this morbid pleasure in pretending to those I love that I am a beast and a cynic? I suffer, I suppose, from a lacerated self-esteem, from a painful loneliness, from the consciousness of how ridiculous I have made myself, and that most people if they knew would regard me with loathing and disgust.
I am very unhappy. I am unhappy because she does not care for me, and I am chiefly unhappy because I do not care for her. Instead of a passion, only a dragging heavy chain of attraction … some inflexible law makes me gravitate to her, seizes me by the neck and suspends me over her, I cannot look away. …
In the early days when I did my best to strangle my love—as one would a bastard child—I took courage in the fact that for a man like me the murder was necessary. There were books to write and to read, and name and fame perhaps. To these everything must be sacrificed. … That is all gone now. No man could have withstood forever that concentrated essence of womanhood that flowed from her. …
Still the declaration has made amends. She is pleased about it—it is a scalp.
Yet how can I forgive her for saying she supposed it was a natural instinct for a girl not to feel drawn to an invalid like me. That was cruel though true.