Was in a state yesterday because I thought I had lost my diary, but found to-day that ‘Fannie’ Cottrell had taken it to take a rise out of me, as the saying is. We got 3 cards from Fr. Pat, who is now visiting Villa d’Este at Tivoli, 14 miles outside Rome. He says it belonged to the Archduke Ferdinand of Austria, but was confiscated by the Italian Government when the war began, and is now sadly neglected. Fr. Pat is awfully good; he is getting me stamps! He is coming home on Friday, and we are going out in the tender to meet him, Hip! Hip! – I have a real passion for foreign lands and peoples and their history, and could sit [for] hours looking at a map of the world. I will probably not go to Germany now, but at all events to Dublin, which I will explore thoroughly, but – ‘The best-laid schemes of mice and men gang aft a-gley’ ((Robert Burns ‘To a Mouse’)). If I think too much on it, it won’t come off at all, and often by delighting myself in anticipation of a coming event, I buoy myself so high that two days beforehand a reaction occurs, and I hate the idea of it. The pleasure then only begins when the event itself has begun.
