Maud working in her
corner by the fire--all things moving so tranquilly and easily in this
pleasantly ordered home-like house of ours. It is good to be at home;
and how pitiful to be hankering thus for something else to fill the
mind, which should obliterate all the beloved things so tenderly
provided. Maud asks about the reception of the latest book, and
sparkles with pride at some of the things I tell her. She sees
somehow--how do women divine these things?--that there is a little
shadow of unrest over me, and she tells me all the comforting things
that I dare not say to myself--that it is only that the book took more
out of me than I knew, and that the resting-time is not over yet; but
that I shall soon settle down again. Then I go off to smoke awhile; and
then the haunting shadow comes back for a little; till at last I go
softly through the sleeping house; and presently lie listening to the
quiet breathing of my wife beside me, glad to be at home again, until
the thoughts grow blurred, take grotesque shapes, sinking softly into
repose.

September 18, 1888.

I have spent most of the morning in clearing up business, and dealing
with papers and letters. Among the accumulations was a big bundle of
press-cuttings, all dealing with my last book. It comes home to me that
the book has been a success; it began by slaying its thousands, like
Saul, and now it has slain its tens of thousands. It has brought me
hosts of letters, from all sorts of people, some of them very
delightful and encouraging, many very pleasant--just grateful and
simple letters of thanks--some vulgar and impertinent, some strangely
intimate. What is it, I wonder, that makes some people want to tell a
writer whom they have never seen all about themselves, their thoughts
and histories? In some cases it is an unaffected desire for sympathy
from a person whom they think perceptive and sympathetic; in some cases
it proceeds, I think, from a hysterical desire to be thought
interesting, with a faint hope, I fear, of being possibly put into a
book. Some of the letters have been simply unintelligible and
inconceivable on any hypothesis, except for the human instinct to
confess, to bare the heart, to display the secret sorrow. Many of these
letters are intensely pathetic, affecting, heart-rending; an invalid
lady writes to say that she would like to know me, and will I come to
the North of England to see her? A man writes a pretentious letter, to
ask me to