have no business to be active monomaniacs: passive ones, as much as you like: I see no harm in that. I am a passive monomaniac myself.'
A little later:
'Imps have been at me to-day. The air has been densely populated with them. Here is a lugubrious account for you! I begin from the beginning.
'Since the morning I had a longing to write one particular thing haunting me. In crowded shops, before me as the cab cut through the streets, beside me as I sat at my desk; wherever I was, whatever I was doing, I saw the same silent figure, with its hand to its brow, standing under a tree in the early evening. I was like an inveterate smoker, robbed of his pipe and left staring at his full tobacco-jar. Once or twice I very nearly went up to my room with paper and pencil to fill in my imaginary picture: having resisted and conquered, I was irritable with everything about me for my own firmness. How cruel it was that I had no time! how badly organised was the world, that so many other people had time, and wasted it!
'Driving down New Bond Street, I saw a young girl, with a pince-nez and walking-stick, staring into a jeweller's window. I at once began to revile her as frivolity's foolish wasp, and must have done so aloud, for the coachman opened the trap to inquire if I had said anything? "No," I said, "drive on!"
'In the evening (this evening) we had a dinner-party. The two men who are going with us on the Expedition, Clarkson and Starkie, were there—with their wives. Also some other "men of mark" with their wives. But the female element was (thank God!) in the minority. That didn't save me, though. I sat between a beetle-browed prude who kept making (bad) eyes at her husband opposite us (a travelling monomaniac, of course!), and a big cavalry officer who had cantered through half a continent, and, as soon as he came home, sat down and written a book on all its histories, languages and literatures. The beetle-browed prude told me about her husband's travels: the cavalry officer about his own. (The lady he had taken in to dinner was a philanthropist, very distinguished, very loquacious.
