I had decided I would put off the novel until I had gone to Europe and had a lover.

Outcast on a cold star, unable to feel anything but an awful helpless numbness. I look down into the warm, earthy world. Into a nest of lovers' beds, baby cribs, meal tables, all the solid commerce of life in this earth, and feel apart, enclosed in a wall of glass.

Bright beads of red are rising through the ink, Hearts-blood bubbles smearing out into the black stream

Then I thought, "No, I broke it myself. I broke it on purpose to pay myself back for being such a heel.

I was my own woman. The next step was to find the proper sort of man.

I am gone quite mad with the knowledge of accepting the overwhelming number of things I can never know, places I can never go, and people I can never be.

I must say that I am not very genteel and I feel that gentility has a stranglehold: the neatness, the wonderful tidiness, which is so evident everywhere in England is perhaps more dangerous than it would appear on the surface.