"Yesterday Wittgenstein began on Dickens, saying David Copperfield ought not to have quarrelled with Steerforth for running away with little Emily. I said I should have done so; he was much pained, and refused to believe it; thought one could and should always be loyal to friends and go on loving them. We got onto Julie Lespinasse, and I asked him how he would feel if he were married to a woman he loved and she ran away with another man. He said (and I believe him) that he would feel no rage or hate, only utter misery. His nature is good through and through; that is why he doesn't see the need of morals. I was utterly wrong at first; he might do all kinds of things in passion, but he would not practise any cold-blooded immorality. His outlook is very free; principles and such things seem to him nonsense, because his impulses are strong and never shameful. I think he is passionately devoted to me. Any difference of feeling causes him great pain. My feeling towards him is passionate, but of course my absorption in you makes it less important to me than his feeling is to him. Oddly enough, he makes me less anxious to live, because I feel he will do the work I should do, and do it better. He starts fresh at a point which I only reached when my intellectual spring was nearly exhausted.

I told W. the story of Julie and then gave him one of her letters to read. He was much moved. I had represented Guibert [?] as the cause of her misery. He said she was bound to be unhappy, since she could love like that. I had never talked with him before about things of that sort."