I find it takes very little time for me to become thoroughly bored. To me life seems to be perpetually on the verge of extinction, which in view of my childhood is natural, and I could bear anything rather than to die in a moment of boredom. I feel that I am insulting something when I am bored. I began to miss London: it was not so much that I had many close friends there, for I have few friends, but I missed variety. My tastes are shallow, my life is shallow, and I like anonymity, change and fame. In Hereford, I could have none of these things: I was condemned to familiarity, which beyond anything I find hard to maintain with ease. There seemed to be nobody in the company that I would like and no opportunity to meet anyone out of it, apart from the girl who handed me my books in the public library. It was not that I disliked people like Julian, but my appreciation of them hardly passed the aesthetic. Also I was continually aware that he and everyone else were leading a life of absorbing, passionate tension, in which a chance compliment from Wyndham Farrar at a rehearsal could create delusions of splendid joy. Wyndham Farrar was another matter, but he was a busy man and my husband’s employer, and not to be met casually in Boots or the pub. He passed me once, during the second week, in his car, as I was walking over the bridge with the pram to the river gardens, and he slowed down and stared and gestured with his hand as though wishing to suggest something, but the car was too large and too fast for me to grasp his suggestion.