mmon little note-books that by the lapse of years have acquired
a touching dimness of aspect, the frayed, worn-out dignity of documents.

Expression on paper has never been my forte. My life had been a thing of
outward manifestations. I never had been secret or even systematically
taciturn about my simple occupations which might have been foolish but
had never required either caution or mystery. But in those four hours
since midday a complete change had come over me. For good or evil I left
that house committed to an enterprise that could not be talked about;
which would have appeared to many senseless and perhaps ridiculous, but
was certainly full of risks, and, apart from that, commanded discretion
on the ground of simple loyalty. It would not only close my lips but it
would to a certain extent cut me off from my usual haunts and from the
society of my friends; especially of the light-hearted, young,
harum-scarum kind. This was unavoidable. It was because I felt myself
thrown back upon my own thoughts and forbidden to seek relief amongst
other lives--it was perhaps only for that reason at first I started an
irregular, fragmentary record of my days.

I made these notes not so much to preserve the memory (one cared not for
any to-morrow then) but to help me to keep a better hold of the
actuality. I scribbled them on shore and I scribbled them on the sea;
and in both cases they are concerned not only with the nature of the
facts but with the intensity of my sensations. It may be, too, that I
learned to love the sea for itself only at that time. Woman and the sea
revealed themselves to me together, as it were: two mistresses of life's
values. The illimitable greatness of the one, the unfathomable seduction
of the other working their immemorial spells from generation to
generation fell upon my heart at last: a common fortune, an unforgettable
memory of the sea's formless might and of the sovereign charm in that
woman's form wherein there seemed to beat the pulse of divinity rather
than blood.

I begin here with the notes written at the end of that very day.

--Parted with Mills on the quay. We had walked side by side in absolute
silence. The fact is he is too old for me to talk to him freely. For
all his sympathy and seriousness I don't know what note to strike and I
am not at all certain what he thinks of all this. As we shook hands at
parting, I asked him how much longer he expected to stay. And he
ans