I find in the Gospels one of the few complaints of Christ.  “Have I been so long time with you and yet hast thou not known me, Philip?” All one has ever felt is said for one in a phrase, all that one finds most isolating in the world is put into one sentence.  There is a wan feeling of wonder in it; “so long,” and yet you think that of me! “so long,” and yet such absolute inability to read my character! “so long,” and yet still quite unaware of my message!  The humour of it (to us) lies in the little side of it!  The dear people who “thought you would like this or dislike that”—­the kind givers of presents even—­the little people who shop for one!  The friends who invite one to their queer, soulless, thin entertainments, with their garish lights; the people who choose a book for one, who counsel one, even with importunity, to go to some play which they are “sure we shall like.”  “So long”—­they are old friends, and yet they thought we should like that play or that book!  “So long”—­and yet they think one capable of certain acts or feelings which do not remotely seem to belong to one!  “So long”—­and yet they can’t even touch one chord that responds!

We are always quite alone.  The communal life is the loneliest of all, because “yet thou hast not known me.”  The world comes next in loneliness, but it is big, and with a big soul of its own.  The family life is almost naive in its misunderstanding—­no one listens, they just wait for pauses....

...  The worship of the “sane mind” has been a little overdone, I think.  The men who are prone to say of everyone that they “exaggerate a little,” or “are morbid,” are like weights in a scale—­just, but oh, how heavy!...

...  This war is fine, fine, FINE!  I know it, and yet I don’t get near the fineness except in the pages of Punch!  I see streams of men whose language (Flemish) I don’t speak, holding up protecting hands to keep people from jostling a poor wounded limb, and I watch them sleeping heavily, or eating oranges and smoking cigarettes down to the last hot stump, but I don’t hear of the heroic stands which I know are made, or catch the volition of it all.  Perhaps only in a voluntary army is such a thing possible.  Our own boys make one’s heart beat, but these poor, dumb, sodden little men, coming in caked with mud—­to be patched up and sent into a hole in the ground again, are simply tragic.

[Page Heading:  “THE WOMAN’S TOUCH”]

7 March.—­“The woman’s touch.”  When a woman has been down on her knees scrubbing for a week, and washing for another week, a man, returning and finding his house in order, and vaguely conscious of a newer and fresher smell about it, talks quite tenderly of “a woman’s touch."...

...  There are some people who never care to enter a door unless it has “passage interdite” upon it....