April 21 + 

We are sitting up in our beds which are side by side in a room on the top story of a boarding house in ⸻ Road. + 

It is 11:30 p.m. and I am leaning over one one side lighting the oil lamp so as to boil the kettle to make Ovaltine before going to sleep. + 

“Whom have I seduced?” I screamed. “You rotter, don’t you know that a dead passion full of regrets is as terrible as a dead body full of worms? There, I talk literature, my boy, if you were only Boswell enough to take it down.⁠ ⁠… As for K⁠⸺, I shall never invite him to dinner again. He comes to me and whines that nobody loves him, and so I say, ‘Oh! poor lad, never mind, if you’re bored, why, come to my rooms of an evening and hear me talk⁠—you’ll have the time of your life.’ And now he’s cheeky.” + 

H. (sipping his drink and very much preoccupied with it) replied abstractedly, “When you die you’ll go to Hell.” (I liked his Homeric simplicity.) “You ought to be buried in a fireproof safe.” + 

Silence. + 

H. (returning to the attack), “I hope she turns you down.” + 

“Thank you,” I said. + 

“As for P⁠⸺,” he resumed, “she’s double-Dutch to me.” + 

“Go to the Berlitz School,” I suggested, “and learn the language.” + 

“You bally fool.⁠ ⁠… All you do is to sit there and smile like a sanguinary cat. Nothing I say ever rouses you. I believe if I came to you and said, ‘Here, Professor, is a Beetle with 99 legs that has lived on granite in the middle of the Sahara for 40 days and 40 nights,’ you’d simply answer, ‘Yes, and that reminds me I’ve forgotten to blow my nose.’ ” + 

The two pyjamaed figures shake with laughing, the light goes out and the sanguinary conversation continues on similar lines until we fall asleep. + 