England, formalities, and release. I am unfit for further service, without scars to show, returnable to civil life at forty-nine and with liberty to wring out of the world whatever entertainment or what further bitterness it yet may hold. My chief feeling is that I must be good for effort yet, that life cannot be over. There is atonement to be made, an atonement non cloistral, giving scope for effort. I have little patience with those natural heartaches to which the most innocent flesh is heir, the unmerited sufferings that are a part of normal inheritance. My sympathies are with the man who has only himself and not Providence to blame, with the well-meaning blackguard, the rascal who has found it easier to deceive the world than to silence the promptings of his better nature. It is twenty years since I sat under parson, but the worn phrases die hard. Jargon sticks like a burr.
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James Evershed Agate was a diarist, journalist, and theatre critic for The Saturday Review (1921–1923), The Sunday Times (1923–1947), and the BBC (1925–1932).