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[[strikethrough]] SATURDAY, JANUARY 4, 1936 [[/strikethrough]]
4th Day   362 Days to come
Cont

& more is inconcievable in the years after getting his technique (5 or 6?)

I loved what the Jew said to him before he [[strikethrough]] te [[/strikethrough]] had discovered he was an artist, because I have secretly thought the same thing, i.e. to the effect that it doesn't matter what you do - it is the quality you have that will make whatever you do good or bad - & chance may find you in the groove most suited to you, but finding that groove isn't the main point, because almost any groove your intelligence hits on will find you. So much for that. Before sailing I went to a really good play with mum & Lu called "Dead End". It is about Sutton Place life right next to tenement life - & living there myself vivified it to a painful degree. It is 9/10 acted by tough little boys, & you feel they were [[strikethrough]] picked [[/strikethrough]] plucked off the streets for the parts.  

A man on board here said he was too much of a realist to find the play painful, but I hadn't meant



[[strikethrough]] SUNDAY, JANUARY 5, 1936 [[/strikethrough]]
5th Day  2nd Sunday after Christmas  361 Days to come
Cont

it that way. What I found painful was where in the end a tenement girl pleads with a rich Sutton Pl. blueblood not to have her little brother sent to the Reformatory for cutting him with a knife. The point is that the boy had given himself up to the police, & that point drummed into the rich man's head hard enough would have convinced him not to send the boy, but in the play she tells him that in drowned tones on the stage so that he barely hears it, & then she pleads in a panicky way saying he must have done wrong himself sometimes too, & you can just see her losing ground in convincing him, & you just wish she would repeat & yell that he had given himself up. That must have been calculated by the author - [[strikethrough]] put it [[/strikethrough]] & it is [[strikethrough]] g [[/strikethrough]] successfully agonizing for the audience, who [[strikethrough]] knows [[/strikethrough]] heard her say he had given himself up, & who knows the rich man didn't [[strikethrough]] the [[/strikethrough]] hear it.  Mum & I went home in a

Transcription Notes:
mum!