MELIHOVO,
July, 1894.
I have so many visitors that I cannot answer your last letter. I want to
write at length but am pulled up at the thought that any minute they may
come in and hinder me. And in fact while I write the word “hinder,” a girl
has come in and announced that a patient has arrived; I must go.... I have
grown to detest writing, and I don’t know what to do. I would gladly take
up medicine and would accept any sort of post, but I no longer have the
physical elasticity for it. When I write now or think I ought to write I
feel as much disgust as though I were eating soup from which I had just
removed a beetle--forgive the comparison. What I hate is not the writing
itself, but the literary entourage from which one cannot escape, and which
one takes everywhere as the earth takes its atmosphere....