it is terribly exciting. What funny people Lawrence’s characters are! They don’t seem to have any ordinary lives, or have to make money or run households or anything. That woman who is a schoolmistress—she never seems to have to bother about her work, one would think it was all holidays at her school. I suppose the author means that the humdrum things don’t really count in one’s life at all, and I expect that is true, only in actual life they do seem to make a lot of difference.
Oh, I do hate this cramping life—always telling lies and smothering up one’s feelings. But tyrants make liars. It is what somebody I read about in the papers calls “slave-psychology.” I feel myself turning into a cringing slave, lying and crawling to get one little scrap of precious freedom—a book, a letter, a thought even—and carrying it off into a corner to gloat over it in secret. That is the way in which I am learning to build up an inner life for myself, a lovely, secret freedom, so that the things He says and does can’t really hurt me any longer. The real Me is free and happy, worshipping in my hidden temple with my darling Idol, my own dear Petra darling.