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to write in a remarkably round and unformed script:
    “Certain things, dear diary, have always been a mystery to me. I have never understood how so many girls, of such different kinds, could fall in love with Lord Byron. I know, of course, that he was supposed to be awfully fascinating in his manner, and very beautiful, and that would have appealed to me, though he was fat , I believe, which I could never have endured; but the thing is that he was lame. I know it’s an awful thing to confess, but I’ve never been able to bear any kind of physical deformity. I just can’t bear to look at a cripple or anyone who’s lost an arm or leg, I’m almost sick at the smell of a hospital, and although I don’t actually faint at the sight of blood I feel as if I could. Even the smells that sometimes come out of brother Edward’s little dispensary make me feel that he must be very insensitive, or he couldn’t endure to make such vile mixtures.
    “Well! I’ve always thought that this feeling was just a part of what it means to have an artistic temperament. After all, it stands to reason if you’re specially sensitive to beauty (as I am – though brother Edward is always so beastly and common about it) you’ll be specially sensitive to ugliness too. I don’t see anything to be ashamed of in that. And I’ve always said to everybody that what I love about Tony, for instance, is that he’s so beautiful. Really, it makes me tremble to look at him, with those wonderful golden curls and great shoulders and perfect figure. And I’ve always felt that anyone I fell in love with must be physically beautiful. Today, though – but I must begin at the beginning.”
    Vicky looked at what she had written with her head on one side. She took great pleasure in reading the back pages of her diary, and often reflected that it was a great pity she couldn’t just read it without being put to the trouble of writing. The Relief nib skimmed over the paper.
    “I went to the Barnsfield Art School this afternoon to hear a lecture from Professor Lester. They say he is very advanced and I expected somebody young and dashing and altogether revolutionary , but he was really a dry old fellow, and kept talking about something called significant form, which I couldn’t make head or tail of. I was at a loose end today because Tony had been awfully mysterious about his actions and said he wouldn’t be free until teatime. I suspected that he meant to go to a horrid cricket match – though I did him an injustice.
    “But, anyway, I wasn’t in a very good temper when I left the lecture, and I was really furious when I got home and found that Mother had invited Colonel Stone and his nephew to tea. Of course, Mother had asked Colonel Stone so that she could flirt with him – really it is too awful the way she makes eyes at this retired Anglo-Indian type (positively out of Kipling) , who has no finer feelings of any kind. But what made me really cross was that Mother typically had told the maid nothing about there being two extra for tea, although she knows that both brother Edward and Anthony have appetites like horses. When I got home she was sitting on a sofa reading a slushy novel and eating chocolates. How she keeps her figure with all the chocolates she eats is a mystery to me. Mother saw that I was annoyed so she told me, with a kind of horrid leer to indicate that it was news which might be specially interesting to me, that the Colonel’s nephew, who had come down to stay with him, was a writer. I received this information coldly. When I asked her his name, she said that it was Kettering – although it turned out to be Basingstoke. Not that either of them meant anything more than a railway station to me.
    “I just had time to go up and change into a new dress (my rather nice green frock with a pleated skirt and really very short, but there you are, they’re getting shorter and shorter and what can you do?), and when I got down they’d arrived.