Actually I wouldn’t care if Glurbia got hold of it and read just what I think of her, and all the others but particularly Glurbia, but I am writing it in my private code and to keep it even more to myself I am keeping it in the Passage. At the rate of present progress (ha ha!) I may have to use this Diary as a safety valve for years and years and years but luckily it is a huge book made even bigger really by the fact that it has thin pages which are a nuisance to write on but gives me more pages. It Is one of Glurbia’s account-books which should have lasted her for the next five years but she’s had to get another one because this one has disappeared. As far as she’s concerned it has anyway. But she thinks she must have mislaid it because if I had taken it what would I have used it for? Well, we shall see.

I have made a place for it at the end of the Passage. Have hidden it, together with this sticky-tipped deep black scriber which I have attached to the lock of the book, together with the dear little key, by a long tape—have hidden it under some stones (which make it rather dusty but never mind).

And I have made a vow to be just as rambling and infantile as I feel like being because what else is a secret Diary for if not to be a recipient of all one’s feelings?

Of course, some people can record happenings in their Diaries, if my books are to be believed, but what hope have I of that?

Their legs are thick and blue-white and when they pull up their trousers, nearly to the knee, so they can kneel easier, this is blatantly visible.

Not only are the legs repulsive but it almost makes me sick to have to look at them.

And poor little me, my own legs are of course longer and

slenderer and a much more aesthetic shape but it wasn’t very nice to have to know that my legs were just as blue-white. Whenever the colour of the legs of the women in the books are mentioned they are “beautiful gold-brown legs.” And I yearned for them. But I can’t even get a little satisfaction like that, oh no. Glurbia caught me lying beside the fountain in the sun, with my trousers off.

“Cija!” the dear old lady gasped and went such a charming shade of magenta. “You wicked, wicked girl! Oh, you wicked—put your clothes back on at once. How dare you act in such a way? What would your mother say? You sinful, shameful girl!”

“I want to get brown,” I said.

Mild enough. No need at all for all the nagging that went on solidly for weeks afterwards, and it’s still always being mentioned.