Now what is to be done next?--I would like to go and confide in the
Duchesse, and tell her that I believe I have fallen in love with my
secretary, who won't look at me, and ask her advice--but that I fear
with all her broad-minded charity, her class prejudice is too strong to
make her really sympathetic. Her French mind of the Ancien Régime
could not contemplate a Thormonde--son of Anne de Mont-Anbin--falling in
love with an insignificant Miss Sharp who brings bandages to the
Courville hospital!

These thoughts tormented me so all yesterday that I was quite feverish
by the evening--and Burton wore an air of thorough disapproval. A rain
shower came on too, and I could not go up on the terrace for the sunset.

I would like to have taken asperines and gone to sleep, when night
came--but I resisted the temptation, telling myself that to-morrow she
would come again.

I am dawdling over this last chapter on purpose--and I have re-read the
former ones and decided to rewrite one or two, but at best I cannot
spread this out over more than six weeks, I fear, and then what excuse
can I have for keeping her? I feel that she would not stay just to
answer a few letters a day, and do the accounts and pay the bills with
Burton. I feel more desperately miserable than I have felt since last
year--And I suppose that according to her theory, I have to learn a
lesson. It seems if I search, as she said one must do without vanity,
that the lesson is to conquer emotion, and be serene when everything
which I desire is out of reach.