Monday 6 June (Whit Monday)

I have been in bed a week with a sudden & very sharp headache, & this is written experimentally to 
test my brain. It is a horrid dull damp Bank holiday morning—(here L. comes in & we spend fifteen minutes 
discussing advertisements. The L. has sold 2,200 & we are reprinting). Nessa says its ugly weather when I ring 
up to offer her half a bottle of turpentine to paint her cupboard with.

But I would like to learn to write a steady plain narrative style. Then perhaps I could catch up with the 
last few weeks; describe my visit to Oxford; & how I lunched with Clive & dined with Dadie & stood in the 
basement printing Gottstalk with a great sense of shade & shelter. I like the obscure anonymity of the Press 
better a good deal than I like Voltaire by Riding. And now, with Morgan's morganatic, evasive, elusive letter 
this morning, The Lighthouse is behind me: my headache over; & after a week at Rodmell, my freedom from 
inspection, my deep dive into my own mind will begin.

How odd, it comes into my mind, is Nessa & my jealousy of each other's clothes! I feel her, when I put 
on my smart black fringed cape, anguished for a second: did I get it from Champco? in the same way I run my 
eye over her Paris dress, & compare it with my last year's Brooke. Then she says she is going to wear earrings: 
I say at once that I will; this she resents. Yet, we are both fundamentally sensible, & soon recover from our 
umbrage.

I think, however, I am now almost an established figure—as a writer. They dont laugh at me any longer. 
Soon they will take me for granted. Possibly I shall be a celebrated writer. Anyhow, The Lighthouse is much 
more nearly a success, in the usual sense of the word, than any other book of mine.

A great knot of people came together suddenly last week, or the week before. Tom—so glad to gossip 
with me off handedly over a cup—no 6 cups—of tea; then he played the gramophone: & Logan, pink & spruce, 
doing his trick of culture & urbanity & good sense very efficiently. He had been evoking the spirit of Henry 
James with Desmond in Paris. (Sibyl, by the way, takes to herself all credit for that fund, I observe. Sibyl, Clive 
& Raymond say, has sold her soul to the devil, & he's now come to fetch it—This phrase is common to them 
both, & gives the measure of smart talk at lunch parties.) Lytton, too, I saw: an invalid after an attack of love, the 
most desperate since Duncan. We talked, with poor marble eyed Cynthia Noble attentive, as far as she can be, 
about the O'B. & his life. I often glide into intimacy with Lytton about books. He is enthusiastic, his mind bare, 
his attention extremely alive, about books; whereas, about love, its more cryptic. Dadie & Douglas were both 
starched & powdered like pasteboard young men at the ballet; legs quite straight; heads curled; shirts granulated; 
they were going on to Kitchin's party, to be bored, as they knew; but in perfect trim for it. This Lytton does not 
quite achieve. We dined ostentatiously rather, it being part of the game to order food from Fortnum & Mason's; 
part of the pathetic, rather attractive, yet also foolish, showing off, very youthful game of being precisely like 
other people.