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second. She had meant, after altering the dates at the top, to use up the unfinished third of the old one, which she had allowed to lapse when she left school, finding that few things happened except those she had no wish to record. With this idea in mind, or perhaps to postpone the pleasure of writing (since the words were already in her head) she beguiled a twilight interval between tea and supper by reading it through. Ritual meant much to her, and was beginning to mean more than ever, so she opened it, carefully, at today’s date of two years ago. The entry was reticent; a row of five asterisks, with another row of five exclamation marks below. The pencil had broken off in the middle of one of them; this was the only incident she could remember of a day which she must evidently have supposed to be carved upon her heart. She tried again, a week later. This page was more informative. It began with a six-pointed star, drawn carefully in the margin with red ink.
    “Did Faerie Queene in Eng. Lit. today. Got to the part about Britomart. It is lovely. I could just see her in her armour looking just like M. did that time she had us into the VI Form Room and put us on our honour about the cloakroom basins. I am going to call her Britomart to myself from today onwards. If Miss Taylor only knew!!!”
    There were several more days with red stars. She read three or four of them, and presently remembered what the five asterisks had celebrated.
    Her bedroom fire was still being kept up. She jumped out of bed, and, moving the fireguard, stood for a moment in her pink crochet bed-jacket and winceyette pyjamas, holding a sombre Byronic pose with the book poised over the flames. When she had dropped it in, she watched it with an enigmatic smile, poked it well under, wiped her hands on the underside of her towel to get rid of the blacklead from the poker, and returned to bed.
    This ceremony, satisfying in itself, left the new diary still unhoused; but she remembered her Latin Unseen book, of which only a page had been used. It began “Then Horatius the gatekeeper, ‘Friends’ he said,” and ended with a derogatory sentence in red ink. Removing this, she headed the clean new sheet:
IMPRESSIONS OF LIFE
    ELSA LANE
    and held it away from her to study the effect.
    Through the left-hand wall she could hear a leisurely arhythmic sound, of moving and pausing footsteps and of light objects being shifted and set down again. She recognized it, without thought, as that of her mother dusting in the next room; it was a settled, soothing noise. Against its background, she bent her knees to support the limp covers of the book, chewed urgently at her pencil for a minute or two, and began to write.
    “March 9th. I have been reading an old diary I wrote when I was a child at school. How long ago it seems! Now I am older I realize how foolish it is to imagine that something worth writing down would happen to one every day (at least to an ordinary person, particularly a girl), so I shall not use this book to put down going for walks or what I had for dinner, but only thoughts that I may wish to remember in later years. Recently I have been thinking a good deal, owing to my illness and to a new influence that has come into my life.
    “For instance: when one is young one is always worrying about whether one’s parents understand one. As one grows up, one realizes that this is a mistake to expect, as old people are less adaptable and the important thing is that one should get to understand them .
    “At school one gets crushes on people and later one thinks one has been silly. But when one is more mature one knows that it is Nature and that one’s feelings have only been practising, ready for something real and beautiful.”
    This completed a page. She had, in any case, meant to begin the next paragraph on a fresh one.
    “There is something very touching to the heart about a Doctor who is young. One thinks of the years before him, with his eyes bent on