When I got home I could not get to sleep: the enormity of my hope seemed to me the measure of the enormity of my failure and disappointment, and I did not wish to feel sorry for myself, I did not wish to have failed. I lay there and wondered what frightful depths of need the chance words of a man whom I did not know and had no reason to like had revealed in me; and I saw then clearly what later became confused, that I was about to be chained, in a fashion so arbitrary that it frightened me, to a passion so accidental that it confirmed nothing but my own inadequacy and inability to grow. As a child I used to comfort myself by saying, “I am a child, this will pass.” But I was no longer a child, there was no reason why this kind of blind rashness should ever pass. This was me, this was myself, this hungry bony bird who was ready for some unexplained famine to eat straw and twigs and paper.
I had just got to sleep when David got in. He woke me up to ask me what I thought of everything and everyone, and then he wanted me to hear his lines. I refused crossly; but what I felt was worse than crossness, it was total, total separation. They had told me it would fail, and I saw, suddenly, what they had meant.