Wednesday, August 6:
R. wakes up with a headache, the reading was a strain on him; he looks through his article again and corrects it. Yesterday he read - and in the morning tells me about - the story of the Turco in Daudet, which seems to him very well done; by comparison V. Hugo just looks like an ogre, he says (he reads some pages from Hernani).
Herr Rubinstein brings along his article on Schumann, which R. finds excellent and which he sends straight to the printers. Wolz. is his philologist, he says, and Rub. would be his musician. Whist in the evening.
In spite of his headache we have much fun during the day; R. describes his continual battles with the law of gravity - how he had wanted to draw the curtains up, had got entangled with them, and then it took him ages to sort it all out.
Glorious sunset, delight in the view from the dressing room, delight in his dressing room, “a convolution of pleasant things,” as he says. But before these delights I hear him say, “How sad it is!” “What?” “That when one wants to say something one finds nothing to attack now beyond bogeys like Schumann - that is sad. Oh, what a world we live in!” Recently we told ourselves that, if we had not had the children, we should probably have been constantly traveling about, first India, then Brazil, etc.
From such reflections I prefer to direct his attention to our home, and it is my triumph to hear him exclaim once again, “I think things are going too well for me.” Today over coffee in the summerhouse he proclaimed that between the ages of 70 and 80 he would “become a very quiet and pleasant gentleman,” adding, “but not shrivel up mentally!”