Wednesday, September 21:
R. busy on his score. Our expecting my father leads the conversation to his relationships and his life, in which we feel we are no more than an item. [The preceding sentence obliterated in ink by an unknown hand.]
We again discuss the fact that in their later years men by themselves are much more helpless than women, citing M[ore] as an example. R. says, “Yes, if only because women like to show they are something in themselves-men do not need to.”
We drive to the theater, inspect the construction of the royal box, on which the brother of our good foreman Grafe is now working. Then the workshop, in which the rollers for the transformation scenery are being planed. R. is much pleased by all this activity, all this effort in the service of an ideal aim, and he thinks of Brandt with gratitude and appreciation.
Very foolish behavior on the part of the children, following the mildest of scoldings from him, makes me angry; but he is filled with feelings of having been unjust to them. And in the evening he sends to the Wolzs for Woodstock and reads aloud the scene following the search in the castle.
Over coffee we talked a lot about Minna, acknowledging both her beauty and the fact that a correct instinct led R. to her: “In that way I was cut off from all acts of foolishness and thought only of my work.” He pities her for having married him.