May 24
In L⸺ with my brother, A⸺. The great man is in great form and very happy in his love for N⸺. He is a most delightful creature and I love him more than anyone else in the wide world. There is an almost feminine tenderness in my love.
We spent a delightful day, talking and arguing and insulting one another. … At these séances we take delight in anaesthetising our hearts for the purposes of argument, and a third person would be bound to suppose we were in the throes of a bitter quarrel. We pile up one vindictive remark on another, ingeniously seeking out—and with malice—weak points in each other’s armour, which previous exchange of confidences makes it easy to find. Neither of us hesitates to make use of such private confessions, yet our love is so strong that we can afford to take any liberty. There is, in fact, a fearful joy in testing the strength of our affection by searching for cutting rejoinders—to see the effect. We rig up one another’s cherished ideals like Aunt Sallies and then knock them down, we wax sarcastic, satirical, contemptuous in turn, we wave our hands animatedly (hand-waving is a great trick with both of us), get flushed, point with our fingers, and thump the table to clinch some bit of repartee. Yet it’s all smoke. Our love is unassailable—it’s like the law of gravitation, you cannot dispute it, it underlies our existence, it is the air we breathe.
N⸺ is charming, and thought we were quarrelling, and therefore intervened on his side!