May 5 + 

The nurse has been here now for over five weeks. One day has been pretty much the same as another. I get out of bed usually about teatime and sit by the window and churn over past, present, and future. However, the Swallows have arrived at last, though they were very late, and there are also Cuckoos, Green Woodpeckers, Moorhens, calling from across the park. At night, when the moon is up, I get a great deal of fun out of an extremely self-inflated Brown Owl, who hoots up through the breadth and length of the valley, and then I am sure, listens with satisfaction to his echo. Still, I have much sympathy with that Brown Owl and his hooting. + 

What I do (goodness knows what E⁠⸺ does), is to drug my mind with print. I am just a ragbag of Smollett, H. G. Wells, Samuel Butler, the Daily News, the Bible, the Labour Leader, Joseph Vance, etc., etc. Except for an occasional geyser of malediction when some particularly acrid memory comes uppermost in my mind, I find myself submitting with a surprising calm and even cheerfulness. That agony of frustration which gnawed my vitals so much in 1913 has disappeared, and I, who expected to go down in the smoke and sulphur of my own fulminations, am quite as likely to fold my hands across my chest with a truly Christian resignation. Joubert said, “Patience and misfortune, courage and death, resignation and the inevitable, generally come together. Indifference to life generally arises with the impossibility of preserving it”⁠—how cynical that sounds. + 