e, and the end of _John Knox_ for another. I cannot write English
because I have been speaking French all evening with some French people
of my knowledge. It's a sad thing the state I get into, when I cannot
remember English and yet do not know French! And it is worse when it is
complicated, as at present, with a pen that will not write! If you knew
how I have to paint and how I have to manoeuvre to get the stuff legible
at all.

_Thursday._--I have said the Fates are only women after a fashion; and
that is one of the strangest things about them. They are wonderfully
womanly--they are more womanly than any woman--and those girt draperies
are drawn over a wonderful greatness of body instinct with sex; I do not
see a line in them that could be a line in a man. And yet, when all is
said, they are not women for us; they are of another race, immortal,
separate; one has no wish to look at them with love, only with a sort of
lowly adoration, physical, but wanting what is the soul of all love,
whether admitted to oneself or not, hope; in a word "the desire of the
moth for the star." O great white stars of eternal marble, O shapely,
colossal women, and yet not women. It is not love that we seek from
them, we do not desire to see their great eyes troubled with our
passions, or the great impassive members contorted by any hope or pain
or pleasure; only now and again, to be conscious that they exist, to
have knowledge of them far off in cloudland or feel their steady eyes
shining, like quiet watchful stars, above the turmoil of the earth.

I write so ill; so cheap and miserable and penny-a-linerish is this
_John Knox_ that I have just sent, that I am low. Only I keep my heart
up by thinking of you. And if all goes to the worst, shall I not be able
to lay my head on the great knees of the middle Fate--O these great
knees--I know all Baudelaire meant now with his _geante_--to lay my head
on her great knees and go to sleep.

_Friday._--I have finished _The Story of King Matthias' Hunting Horn_,
whereof I spoke to you, and I think it should be good. It excites me
like wine, or fire, or death, or love, or something; nothing of my own
writing ever excited me so much; it does seem to me so weird and
fantastic.

_Saturday._--I know now that there is a more subtle and dangerous sort
of selfishness in habit than there ever can be in disorder. I never
ceased to be generous when I was most _deregle_; now when I am beginning
to settle into