VIRGINIA AND HER HUSBAND, LEONARD WOOLF

First he is a Jew; second he is 31; third, he spent 7 years in Ceylon, governing natives, inventing ploughs, shooting tigers, and did so well that they offered him a very high place, which he refused, wishing to marry me, and gave up his entire career there on the chance that I would agree. He has no money of his own… but from the first I have found him the one person to talk to.

We analyse each other’s idiosyncrasies in the light of psycho-analysis walking round the square. My reports, however, are apt to twist up into balls what is really amicable, serious, disinterested, and almost wholly affectionate. It’s true that Leonard sees my faults.

I mind missing life far more than he does, for it isn’t life to him in the sense that it is life to me. Oh to be able to slip in & out of things easily, to be in them, not on the verge of them—I resent this effort and waste…But half the horror is that Leonard instead of being, as I gathered, sympathetic has the old rigid obstacle—my health.

He sits on the edge of the bed and considers my symptoms like a judge. He brings home huge pineapples: he moves the gramophone into my room and plays until he thinks I’m excited. In short, I should have shot myself long ago in one of these illnesses if it hadn’t been for him.

And I can’t sacrifice his peace of mind, yet the obstacle is surely now a dead hand, which one should no longer let dominate our short years of life.

But I doubt that I shall ever convert Leonard and now sit down baffled and depressed to face a life spent, mute and mitigated, in the suburbs, just as I had it in mind that I could at last go full speed ahead. For the capacities in me will never after 40, accumulate again.