In the afternoon I read Conan Doyle in English. Bashkirov came for a lesson. We have been working now for a month, and I think he is making progress. He wanted me to go to dinner with him and was very insistent, but I went to the first I.R.M.S. concert, an all-Tchaikovsky programme. Although I love Tchaikusha, I was less interested in his music, especially in the limp performance it received from Malko, than I was in the palette of its orchestral sounds, since this is what I am mostly thinking about at the moment with reference to my ballet. Alas, the first movement of the Second Symphony is dreadfully badly constructed, and in places sounds simply bad. Things are better in the Third Orchestral Suite, but even here most of it is extremely modest.