The Journal of a Disappointed Man

PART II--IN LONDON 1912 January 21. Am at last beginning to get more content with the work at the Museum, so that I muse on Bernard Shaw's saying, "Get what you like or you'll grow to like what you get." I have a terrible suspicion that the security of tenure here is like the lion's den in the fable--Nulla vestiga retrorsum. Of course I am wonderfully proud of being at the Museum, although I am disappointed and write as if I were quite blasé. January 25. I should be disappointed if at the end of my career (if I live to see it through) I do not win the F.R.S. I should very much like it.... My nature is very mixed--ambitious above all things and yet soon giddy with the audacity of my aspirations. The B.M. and my colleagues make me feel most inferior in fact, but in theory--in the secrecy of my own bedchamber--I feel that there are few men there my equal. April 26. Down with influenza. A boarding-house with the 'flue! May 8. Went home to recuperate, a beef jelly in one pocket and sal volatile in the other. On arrival, my blanched appearance frightened Mother and the others, so went to bed at once. "Fate's a fiddler, life's a dance." May 12. Weak enough to sit down before dressing-table while I shave and brush my hair. Dyspepsia appalling. The Doctor in Kensington seemed to think me an awful wreck and asked if I were concealing---- Reading Baudelaire and Verlaine.