Down here for a few days to get a change and some sea air. I like Brighton, though most of my friends seem to think I am peculiar to do so. Good walking. Good bookshops. Comfortable hotel. Of course it was here that I started to write "Clayhanger" so many years ago now, and it doesn't seem to have changed much in the meantime.
Walter Sickert and wife (Therese Lessore) and Cobb and Schuster and Wylde dined with us here. Sickert, now aged 66, was in great form, especially towards the end of the dinner and later when we came up to our sitting room. His wife was very quiet and dark and sweet, but far less quiet than when I sat next to her at dinner at Ethel Sands' a year or two ago. I
mentioned “Clayhanger” to her, and she asked why I had stopped
writing Five Towns novels. I told her that I had said all I wanted to
say, that the well had run dry. She said it was a shame.Sickert said some fine sopund things. He explained to us exactly why he liked Leader's pictures. But his pose is increasing of admiring the public as a judge of art. I said that what he said was only half true, and he said: "Yes, but there is a great deal in it."
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