Sunday, August 27:
R. slept better last night and hopes to be able to work. He says to me with a laugh, “How different people are! I asked Friedrich about that haymaker who yodeled during the night, and he answered, ‘He is a scoundrel.’ Yet I found it touching that, having put up his tent in the meadow too far from the house, he yodeled out loud every time he woke up, in order to chase off his loneliness.”
Yesterday evening R. again became very heated about the present spirit of the public, which profanes and degrades women. The woman who dresses up for the street is an absurdity, the conventional gallantry of men toward her a bad veneer concealing vulgarity of the worst sort. He is also in favor of marriages arranged by parents in the true interests of their families; nowadays, he says, everyone wants to live his own romantic novel and imagines that this rarest of things, love, over which whole epics have been written, is an everyday affair which happens to us all.
R. does some work. Family lunch. In the afternoon a visit by Princess Hatzfeld and Herr and Frau von Schleinitz; they say goodbye to us, since they are going to Engelberg. In the evening Carlyle. The newspaper reports that Hans is to make concert tours during the winter, to Switzerland, Austria, etc. My gnawing grief never leaves me, and I do not wish to dispel it, but will carry it to my grave. Rus is ill and very miserable.