Friday, November 2:
Yesterday R. came to meet me as I returned from the cemetery and said he had been considering that in 10 years’ time he would be 75, and he was terribly vexed that our happiness was not of longer duration: “You made such a silly mess of things with your first marriage,” he told himself. However long it may now last, we cannot make up for that lost time. “I shall love you till I die,” he says today in reply to my question.
All Souls’ Day! I bid you welcome and linger with you! Compared with this life below, mostly in shadow, how gently you dwell within me! R. works; in the afternoon some inspiration which he had thought good in the morning sounds garish to him. He closes the lid of the piano to damp it down, finds his way again, and, in order to give me, as I work above with the children, a signal that he is satisfied, plays the charming theme from the coda of the first movement of Mozart’s C Major Symphony. In the evening we read Huxley’s address on education and find it excellent, apart from his opinion of German universities, which suggests a certain degree of ignorance.