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several days later there is a further entry:
    I have been re-reading that letter from Miss Forsdike. For some reason it disturbs me. I have brooded on it all this evening. She is unbalanced, of course—it would be wrong to make too much of it. And yet . . . I go back to it again and again.
    It is as if she were the devil, taking me up into a high mountain and showing me all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time.
    She talks of my power. "You can lead us. You can give us a direction, aim." I have felt that myself. I have thought that, and put away the thought.
    Often I have felt that if I wanted to I could do anything with men. But I am afraid of this power. It is something that I dare not, must not use. Often I have felt what she describes in her letter—that people are waiting for some divine intervention from me. Perhaps I should give it to them. Perhaps it is wrong of me to hold back.
    "The smiling public figures." How well I know what she means by that. But is their deceit any worse than mine? Are they greater impostors? The difference is that they are satisfied with the esteem of the many, while I want the esteem of the few. Mine is the larger ambition. The few—S. N. G., for example—are not taken in by public speeches, and honours, and decorations. They see these things for what they are—a pretence. But is not the "integrity" which they admire in me also a pretence? In their fear of being imposed on by politicians—in their reaction towards someone like me, apparently without ambition—are they not being imposed on by a force more subtle? I am cleverer than the public figures; I want more. That is the only difference.
    This woman reads my thoughts. She is prompting me—crudely, ludicrously—but prompting me, always prompting me.
    I will not give in.
A letter from S. N. GEORGE (extract)
May 6th , 1937
    ...Two women bicycled over from Somerville to-day to see me. I gave them tea in the garden. How I love sitting behind my silver teapot, civilised, comfortable, with my roses around me and a cat on my lap! I know you despise this; and I myself feel furtively ashamed about it all. But old ladies, and Kensington hotels, and the Army and Navy Stores—these have for me the same romance, the same nostalgia that you find in the Aztecs. This world of Daimlers, and modesty-vests and Queen Mary toques—as I grow older, I feel more and more that I belong to it.
    The two women were intelligent but rather dreary. Of course they asked the expected questions: Is it necessary to have a knowledge of Orphic rites to appreciate The Effigy? What are you working on now? Would you please explain that line?... etc., etc.
    Then we somehow moved on to politics, and one of the women began talking of the equality of the sexes. H. W., why do they do it? Do they really believe that such a thing exists? I didn’t give my opinion because I was afraid of shocking them. But what I should like to have said was that so far from Nature creating the sexes equal, she seems to have taken a perverse, an almost fiendish, delight in their inequalities.
    On the physical side man has it all his own way—pragmatically, æsthetically. Nature has given him abundant energy, the pleasures of concupiscence, health; but woman is a sickly creature, slave to a monthly ritual, incapable of true orgiastic frenzy (she would like to think she is; in this she imitates man). Then the æsthetics of the question. Women artfully conceal their deficiencies under clothes, and corsets, and paint, and jewellery. But compare the sexes naked...
    Is this equality? But take the spiritual side. Here women have it all their way. Men are for the most part brutes: savouring their physical sensations, making money, acquiring possessions—wives, children, houses, honours. You must turn
    to women if you want true Christian virtues. It is women who are weak, and humble, and selfless, and loving. (That, incidentally, is why so many of my best friends are women.) The equality of