I have had a good deal of time for reading recently. I have read Wordsworth and Hume and Victorian novels, and other things. Hume sums it all up in one sentence: by the word “all” I indicate the subject, my marriage. “Whoever considers,” Hume says, “the length and feebleness of human infancy, with the concern which both sexes naturally have for their offspring, will easily perceive that there must be a union of male and female for the education of the young, and that this union must be of considerable duration.” I like the way that Hume slips in words like “naturally” and “easily”; he reminds me of my father, disarming by the apparent mildness of his expectations. And the phrase “of considerable duration” rolls round my mind with the comforting logic that more passionate descriptions lack. It answers all of them, Mike Papini and Wyndham and Sophy and David and the lot, and it reminds me, too, of what Wyndham said, of the necessary pleasure of feeling from time to time the warm sense of defeat. I have read Wordsworth also, the early poems, those selfsame poems over which I sniggered and jeered when seventeen and brilliant at school: we were taught to think them ludicrous, and at The Idiot Boy even Mary Scott had laughed. But now I do not laugh, I weep, real wet tears, the same tears that I shed over newspaper reports of air disasters, for they are as moving as air disasters, those poems, they have as high a content of uninflated truth. And I weep partly as an apology for my past ignorance, from which I might never have been rescued. Wordsworth, and the sylvan Wye, which got Julian and made a bid for my Flora. Time and maternity can so force and violate a personality that it can hardly remember what it was.