Saturday, December 31:
The sun is not quite loyal to us, it fights through only now and then, and R. again has a chest spasm. All too many things vex him-struggles with an ink which will not flow and a thousand other petty things of which he tells us vexedly at lunch, for which he arrives late; but his mood then changes to one of great merriment when I agree with him that life is terrible, in the little as well as the big things.
After lunch we drive to the Orto Botanico and delight in the splendid trees there. He works in the evening, and when I ask him at table how much he still has to do, he says mournfully, “Fifteen pages,” and then with quiet satisfaction, “Fourteen” (with a slight Saxon accent).
In the evening we begin G[ottfried] Keller’s novella Sinngedicht; the opening pleases us, R. says he has seen women of this kind in Switzerland, and the form of expression seems felicitous; but when we come to Lucie, the educated lady, we break off, and R. says all that has been taken from books. He exclaims, “God knows, there are times when nothing seems real to me but music!”
Our Bonus goes to a ball, taken to Princess Butera’s by Princess Fflangieri; we enter the New Year sleeping.