I see on the street - you know what I mean by hate - wish they were
somewhere else, and not there to mock me; and sometimes, again, I
don't know how to go by them for the love of them, especially the
very wee ones.

THURSDAY. - I have been still in the house since I wrote, and I
HAVE worked. I finished the Italian story; not well, but as well
as I can just now; I must go all over it again, some time soon,
when I feel in the humour to better and perfect it. And now I have
taken up an old story, begun years ago; and I have now re-written
all I had written of it then, and mean to finish it. What I have
lost and gained is odd. As far as regards simple writing, of
course, I am in another world now; but in some things, though more
clumsy, I seem to have been freer and more plucky: this is a
lesson I have taken to heart. I have got a jolly new name for my
old story. I am going to call it A COUNTRY DANCE; the two heroes
keep changing places, you know; and the chapter where the most of
this changing goes on is to be called 'Up the middle, down the
middle.' It will be in six, or (perhaps) seven chapters. I have
never worked harder in my life than these last four days. If I can
only keep it up.

SATURDAY. - Yesterday, Leslie Stephen, who was down here to
lecture, called on me and took me up to see a poor fellow, a poet
who writes for him, and who has been eighteen months in our
infirmary, and may be, for all I know, eighteen months more. It
was very sad to see him there, in a little room with two beds, and
a couple of sick children in the other bed; a girl came in to visit
the children, and played dominoes on the counterpane with them; the
gas flared and crackled, the fire burned in a dull economical way;