I was wrong to fight shy of my brother-in-law. I can hardly believe that he is a very remarkable jurist, but when we are together he has the sense to keep off his shop as much as I off mine, so that we get on very well.

Naturally when I got there that morning I did not breathe a word of my recent meeting:

“It will give me an opportunity, I hope, of making my nephews’ acquaintance,” I said, when Pauline asked me to stay to lunch. “For, you know, there are two of them I have never met.”

“Olivier will be a little late,” she said; “he has a lesson; we will begin lunch without him. But I’ve just heard George come in, I’ll call him.” And going to the door of the adjoining room, “George,” she said, “come and say ‘how-do-you-do’ to your uncle.”

The boy came up and held out his hand. I kissed him … children’s power of dissembling fills me with amazement—he showed no surprise; one would have supposed he did not recognize me. He simply blushed deeply; but his mother must have thought it was from shyness. I suspected he was embarrassed at this meeting with the morning’s ‘tec,’ for he left us almost immediately and went back to the next room—the dining-room, which I understood is used by the boys as a schoolroom between meals. He reappeared, however, shortly after, when his father came into the room, and took advantage of the moment when we were going into the dining-room, to come up to me and seize hold of my hand without his parents’ seeing. At first I thought it was a sign of good fellowship which amused me, but no! He opened my hand as I was clasping his, slipped into it a little note which he had obviously just written, then closed my fingers over it and gave them a tight squeeze. Needless to say I played up to him; I hid the little note in my pocket and it was not till after lunch that I was able to take it out. This is what I read:

“If you tell my parents the story of the book, I shall” (he had crossed out “detest you”) “say that you solicited me.”

And at the bottom of the page:

“I come out of school every morning at 10 o’clock.”

Interrupted yesterday by a visit from X. His conversation upset me considerably.

Have been reflecting a great deal on what X. said. He knows nothing about my life, but I gave him a long account of the plan of my Counterfeiters. His advice is always salutary, because his point of view is different from mine. He is afraid that my work may be too factitious, that I am in danger of letting go the real subject for the shadow of the subject in my brain. What makes me uneasy is to feel that life (my life) at this juncture is parting company from my work, and my work moving away from my life. But I couldn’t say that to him. Up till now—as is right—my tastes, my feelings, my personal experiences have all gone to feed my writings; in my best contrived phrases I still felt the beating of my heart. But henceforth the link is broken between what I think and what I feel. And I wonder whether this impediment which prevents my heart from speaking is not the real cause that is driving my work into abstraction and artificiality. As I was reflecting on this, the meaning of the fable of Apollo and Daphne suddenly flashed upon me: happy, thought I, the man who can clasp in one and the same embrace the laurel and the object of his love.

I related my meeting with George at such length that I was obliged to stop at the moment when Olivier came on the scene. I began this tale only to speak of him and I have managed to speak only of George. But now that the moment has come to speak of Olivier I understand that it was desire to defer that moment which was the cause of all my slowness. As soon as I saw him that first day, as soon as he sat down to the family meal, at my first look—or rather at his first look—I felt that look of his take possession of me wholly, and that my life was no longer mine to dispose of.

Pauline presses me to go and see her oftener. She begs me urgently to interest myself in her boys. She gives me to understand that their father knows very little about them. The more I talk to her, the more charming I think her. I cannot understand how I can have been so long without seeing more of her. The children have been brought up as Catholics; but she remembers her early Protestant training, and though she left our father’s home at the time my mother entered it, I discover many points of resemblance between her and me.